


Le Toi du Moi (Lyon)

by zetaophiuchi (ryuujitsu)



Series: Chamonix [3]
Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Bipolar Disorder, Blow Jobs, Climate Change, Fluff, Greenery, Hand Jobs, Humidity, Infidelity, Jealousy, Just Kidding It's 2029, Lucas Get Your Shit Together for the Love of God, Lyon - Freeform, M/M, Manic Pixie Dream Boy, Masturbation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mt. Tenderest, Suicidal Ideation, Summer, Tattoos, The Distant Future, The Year 2000, emotional whiplash, parks and recreation - Freeform, your teeth will fall out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-02-08 20:56:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18631066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryuujitsu/pseuds/zetaophiuchi
Summary: He’s dreamed of Eliott in the years between. He’s dreamed of chases through chambers of ice, crevasses cracking open beneath his feet. He’s dreamed of Eliott’s mouth, cold as death, of Eliott’s eyes, frozen, sightless, frost in his eyelashes.He’s wondered what it would be like to see Eliott again, let his mind spiral through the possibilities, but he’s never been able to decide how it would feel.In this moment, it feels like drowning.“Lucas,” Eliott says. “Itisyou, isn’t it? Lucas Lallemant.”Ten years after Eliott breaks Lucas' heart, they meet again in Lyon.A sequel to my melancholy alpine Elu AU,Chamonix. I’d recommend starting there.





	1. les éclats de mon rire

**Author's Note:**

> > “Where will we meet again? On the Needle? At the glacier? Here, on Mont Blanc?”
>> 
>> “No. None of these places.”
>> 
>> “Then where?”
> 
> Every outdoor summer moment of this fic is based on a happy day in May when I lay down in a park somewhere in Dublin (College Park?) and watched the sun shining through each individual green blade of grass.
> 
> -
> 
> Suggested listening: [Le Chant des Sirènes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuh6x_tqvvc) by Fréro Delavega.
> 
> In general, I recommend that you _don't_ do what I did, which was to play [Le Toi du Moi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Pj3h7Fbb3I) on repeat until Spotify asked me if I was okay. (I wasn't. These soft French boyfriends have destroyed me.)
> 
> Also [Sometimes I Still Feel the Bruise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1WFEFb3Q18) and [High Hopes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pi6kFYR8zk), as suggested by [FLWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite).
> 
> -
> 
> Many thanks, as always, to [FLWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite) for their encouragement, enablement, and insightful edits. Read their Elu fic [here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1299536). Read our joint Maxel series, “2 boys, 1 dog, 1 snake,” [here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1314218), and find us on Tumblr here: [@hallo-catfish](https://hallo-catfish.tumblr.com/), [@xiangyu](https://xiangyu.tumblr.com/).
> 
> If you are struggling with depression, anxiety, or thoughts of self-harm, please be gentle with yourself. It does and will get better.
> 
> <https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/>
> 
> <https://thelifelinecanada.ca/help/call/>

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Antonio Tonelli (b.1934) - _The Big Comet._ 2004\. Acrylic on canvas
> 
> __
> 
> But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you…
> 
> __
> 
> Of course I love you. It is my fault that you have not known it all the while.
> 
> __
> 
> — _Le Petit Prince_ , 1943
> 
> __

Eliott texts him from the hospital: fairytales, fantasies. _Let’s run away together. Lucas, I love you. Lucas, I’m thinking of you every day. Lucas, Lucas, Lucas._

And then he stops, and then he fades. Into the splintered darkness of memory.

Six months after their Chamonix vacation, after the forty-eight hours that were so nearly disastrous, the forty-eight hours they’ve chosen to entomb in silence, the Lallemants separate. M. Lallemant settles down in Florence. Mme. Lallemant resides in Paris, taking comfort in her Masses, her relics. She doesn’t talk much about her husband and _la concubine_ , so many years younger, buxom, as irreverent as they come _._

The sea of ice shrinks and the oceans rise, and Lucas Lallemant grows older. Quietly, he obtains his bac, he receives his _licence_ , he celebrates another year, another year, another year. He falls—in love? _In love?_ Has he been in love since?

No, perhaps not. But he meets Chloé his very first day in Lyon, bumbling about with his suitcase, hopelessly lost from the moment he alighted from the train, and he liked how her eyes crinkled at the corners when she smiled at him. And she smiled at him quite a bit.

“Directions to Avenue Albert Einstein,” she said, scribbling them down on a sheet torn from her notebook, “and my number, M. _L’Ingénieur_. Keep your phone charged from now on, okay?”

He does, and he texts her from time to time. He meets her between classes, after classes. He can focus on her, on her small, dark presence, her sweet crinkling smile; she draws his gaze downward, inward, away from the starved, jagged spine of the Alps, bluish in the distance. Even so, a full year passes—a mild Christmas and an unseasonably cold Easter in Paris, and two difficult, sleepless terms—before he works up the courage to ask her to dinner.

It’s June, and the city is bursting with life all around them. People and birds roam the sidewalks in pairs.

Chloé crinkles at him; she says she’d almost given up hope; she says yes.

_It’s about fucking time_ , Yann says. _There’s playing the slow game, and then there’s playing the Lucas game._

Arthur: _Patience of a saint, Chloé._

_What I don’t understand about women,_ Basile says, _is why they don’t ask first._

Yann: _They do, idiot, just not with you._

_—Hey, hey, hey. Who’s getting married in October? Is it any of you assholes? No, I didn’t think so._

Arthur intervenes. _Yes, and we’re all very happy for you, Baz._

_—Damn straight._

_So who’s going to be best man?_ Lucas asks, blithely kicking the hornet’s nest. _Do we fight for the honor? Is it rapiers at dawn?_

Yann chimes in. _Yeah. The musketeers must go head to head. I, D’ArtanYann, will kick all your asses._

_Bah, well, it can’t be you, Lucas,_ Basile says, after a long pause where he types and retypes. _Sorry, but you’re geographically eliminated. Running off to Lyon for a master’s degree is very un-best-man-like behavior. A master’s, fuck! I thought Imane was going to drop dead from the shock. Did she take the entrance exam for you?_

Lucas grins.

_—Haven’t flunked out yet. And you can’t change the subject. Arthur or Yann, Baz?_

_—Yeah, me or Yann?_

_—Me or Arthur?_

_—I have to go. Daphné’s calling me._

 

 

June boils into July. Basile continues to vacillate. The semester ends; his English workshop begins. He kisses Chloé on her doorstep a week after their second date, and she laughs and tells him he doesn’t have to be such a gentleman. She offers to tutor him.

“In English?” he says.

“In ungentlemanly behavior,” she says. She kisses him again as he stands there dry-mouthed. Her body presses against his, so soft. “Do you want to come in?”

“I can’t,” he says reflexively. “I have a seminar tomorrow. Bright and early.”

“Always so diligent, M. _L’Ingénieur_ ,” Chloé says. She strokes his face: one last darting peck, the swoop of her hair against his throat like the feathers of a brown sparrow. “Okay. Call me tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says. He watches her disappear inside.

The sharp metallic click of the door closing behind her releases him, as though from a spell. At once, his legs feel lighter. He springs down the front steps toward the curb, bag jostling on his shoulder. The evening air sits sweetly on his skin. It will be cooler by the river. He’ll walk across the University Bridge and take the metro north from Ampère.

His phone buzzes. _Let love be genuine,_ his mother writes. He jolts in surprise, but the message continues: _Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Romans 12:9. My son, I’m thinking of and praying for you always._

Chloé sends a smiley face and a kiss. He starts to respond, sifting through his keyboard for a top hat.

_Hey, kitten,_ Mika interrupts. _It’s your turn to do the dishes, I hope you haven’t forgotten._

Groaning, Lucas silences his phone and shoves it deep into his bag.

He stops at the Lidl to buy more washing up liquid and an Orangina. The sun has nearly set by the time he emerges: a thin burning line of red cuts the horizon above the black band of the Rhône. He starts across the river, sipping at his Orangina, enjoying the rubbery bounce of his soles against the pavement, the flags of Université Lumière Lyon 2 billowing at his back. The flow of traffic and the noise of students and diners, the clattering utensils, the laughter, the horns and the crosswalk chirps rise to a fever pitch and dim into silence. A cyclist flashes past on the other side of the bridge, a smear of neon, and then he is utterly alone. He imagines his feet rising with the swell of the curvature of the earth. Pont de l’Université is a belt across the belly of the world.

“Lucas,” a voice says in the gloaming dark, “Lucas Lallemant.”

 

 

He’s dreamed of Eliott in the years between. He’s dreamed of chases through chambers of ice, crevasses cracking open beneath his feet. Sometimes he hurdles them, sometimes he falls through. He’s dreamed of Eliott’s mouth, cold as death, of Eliott’s eyes, frozen, sightless, frost in his eyelashes. There have been other dreams, too, suffused in golden darkness, sun and shadow playing through the deep green of summer leaves, speckling across Eliott’s hand in his, warm and precious beyond measure.

He’s wondered what it would be like to see Eliott again, let his mind spiral through the possibilities, but he’s never been able to decide how it would feel.

In this moment, it feels like drowning.

“Lucas,” Eliott says. “It _is_ you, isn’t it? Lucas Lallemant.”

He looks exactly the same in the soft lights lining the bridge, untouched by the march of time— _preserved in ice_ , Lucas thinks, _a prisoner of the fairies_ — _a phantom_ —his hair as long and wild and tawny as Lucas remembers, his body just as tall, but a little slighter, a little more stooped. But of course, Lucas realizes, of course he looks thinner, stripped of the bulk of a heavy winter coat. Every bare part of his body, his arms, his throat, his ankles, his hands, seems to be glowing. His eyes, too, glow, as they take Lucas in.

The years are peeling away, fracturing from his person and falling in pieces at his feet. He’s shrinking, shifting. If he had a better sense of drama, Lucas thinks numbly, he’d let the Orangina fall too. Instead it just drops to his side, held too tightly to even splash.

“Eliott,” he says. His voice is jarringly loud above the whisper of the river. He frightens himself; he recoils. He goes hot and cold and hot again.

Eliott’s smile breaks over him, a wave of pure joy. “Yes,” he says. “It’s me, it’s Eliott.”

He takes one bobbing step closer, then another, and Lucas can feel the heat rising from him; the answering lurch in his chest is like a rockslide.

Eliott looks at him, wordless; he seems to be holding his breath. Then he releases it all at once in a huff, a laugh or sigh of relief, Lucas can’t tell, and he jerks forward and brushes his cheek against Lucas’, left, right, left again, his hands hovering millimeters above Lucas’ shoulders, his breath warm and damp: the dew shivering from snowdrops in a green field.

Lucas keeps his grip on the Orangina and on the strap of his bag; he looks straight ahead at the far shore as the tawny hair slides cross his cheek and the smell of Eliott fills his nostrils and his heart pitches within its cage.

Eliott’s hands are trembling as he pulls them back and jams them into the pockets of his jeans. He looks down at his feet, conspiratorial, he bounces on his heels; he shoots Lucas a glance from beneath his lashes, his smile widening even as he bites at it, pressing his lips together.

“I can’t believe it,” he says. 

_Speak_ , Lucas screams at himself. “Eliott,” he says. “Wow.”

Eliott grins. “What are you doing here?” he says. He looks Lucas over from head to foot, with the beatific crinkling gaze that has followed Lucas through his dreams, made him twitch and twist around in crowds, scanning the faces at the metro, the supermarket, the cinema, searching, searching. “Lucas, I can’t believe it.”

Lucas is starting not to believe it either. He concentrates on the Orangina sweating in his palm, the laughter coming distantly from the opposite bank. He tries to anchor himself to the stone of the bridge.

“I’m going to school,” he says. “My masters. Engineering.”

“At the Polytech?” Eliott says. Lucas shakes his head. “At INSA? Shit, Lucas. That’s amazing.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Sometimes I think they must have meant to admit a different Lucas. Lucas Lallemand, with a ‘d.’”

“Oh, please,” Eliott says, and laughs. The sound rings out over the water. Lucas shivers. “Do you live on campus?”

He squeezes the neck of the bottle. “No—north of here. On Barodet.”

“Near the _fresque_ ,” Eliott says. “How nice.”

“I guess,” Lucas says. “It’s full of fucking tourists at the moment.”

Eliott shrugs, one-shouldered, dismissing the tourists. “And your parents,” he says eagerly, “they’re well? They’re still—?”

“In Paris,” Lucas says. “Well, my mother, anyway. My father has absconded to _il paradiso italiano_ , with a _mistress_.” He says it carelessly. He sees his mother’s silvery head bent in prayer and Anna’s curly dark hair flying as she laughs: the cool gloom of a Paris evening and the air wavering in the heat of a Florentine afternoon. He thinks of the _fresque_ of the silk workers, so close in proximity to the church of Saint Denis. He has yet to set foot on its front steps.

“Ah,” Eliott says, crinkling now in sympathy. “So Annecy didn’t save them.”

A breath of alpine air chills the back of his neck; the mountains loom large. “No,” he agrees faintly, as his heart begins to drum.

“Where are you going now?” Eliott asks. “The station? I’ll walk with you. You don’t mind?”

“No,” Lucas says, swallowing, “no, I don’t mind.”

 

 

Station Bellecour, Wednesday, at eleven o’clock at night. Lucas stands on the platform and jabs at his phone with clammy fingers. _I just ran into someone on the fucking bridge,_ he tells Le Gang, _on the fucking University Bridge_. _A person from a long time ago. He—_

The train arrives. He starts over. _She wants to meet up tomorrow. I don’t know if I should._

_You bastard,_ Yann says, two stops later, _why is it only now that you’re telling us about this grand adolescent romance?_

_Because she was crazy_ , Lucas says.

_—Crazy how?_

_—Crazy crazy. Sent to the hospital crazy._

_Maybe things have changed,_ Yann says. _It’s been how long?_

_—Ten years. More than._

_—Ten years. Go meet her. If she’s still crazy, you can always run away, Sonic._

He starts running just then: toward his transfer, taking the stairs two and three at a time, throwing himself through the doors of the carriage and slamming into an empty seat. The C train rumbles as it leaves Hôtel de Ville, climbing steeply toward Croix-Paquet. Lucas has ridden this line hundreds of times, but now, for the first time, he experiences vertigo; he tilts toward the darkened window, fully expecting to encounter the white gleam of new-fallen snow. He sees only his reflection, dim and jaundiced.

Ping. _I don’t like it_ , Basile says. _First of all, ‘crazy,’ what does that even mean? That’s a generalization. Schizophrenic? Depressed? Bipolar? My mama’s ‘crazy,’ if you’ll recall._

His stomach drops. _Right, sorry._

Arthur pops into the chat. _Ooh, Baz, I love it when you use big words._

Basile persists. _And secondly, what about Chloé, man? You can’t play her like that._

Off at Hénon, up the stairs with his free hand skating along the bannister, north up the boulevard. The hanging boughs of trees are heavy with greenery. He stops beneath the silk workers. Their windows, real and false, are painted with cascades of wisteria and ivy. He hears the excitement in Eliott’s voice; he pictures Eliott standing where he is now, feet firmly planted, looking up, smiling at the flowers.

_—It’s not serious, me and Chloé._ _We’re not all like you, marrying the first person we fall in love with._

Arthur again: _Yeah, if that were the case, I’d be married to my elementary school teacher, à la Macron._

_Gross_ , Yann says. _But bravo, Baz, you’re an inspiration to us all._

_—Learn from me, my brothers._

He swings onto Barodet, scuffing his sneakers on the old cobbles that line the edge of the street, half paved over. In through the gate, up more stairs. One flight, two, three. He counts the steps as he climbs them. The noise of the street falls away and is replaced by a duet of lovestruck crickets and the night breeze as it winds sleepily through the leaves in the courtyard. He can hear Mika singing along with some foamy top-of-the-charts pop, dancing across their creaking wooden floor. His key jangles in the lock; his feet scrape on the mat. He throws his bag down in the entryway with a thud.

“Welcome back, kitten,” Mika calls out, between verses.

His heart beats and beats and beats. He stands by the door, smiling placidly, as though Le Gang can see him, as though Mika is watching, as though nothing has happened and nothing is wrong. The shadow of Eliott drapes itself over him, all velvet, all heat. His skin prickles. His throat tightens. He texts with trembling fingers.

_—Have you picked a best man yet?_

_—Fuck off, Lucas, it’s late, I’m going to bed._

He slips into the kitchen. The window is open, the air smells vaguely of chocolate, and a baking tray is soaking in the sink. He sets the new bottle of dish soap down on the counter and grabs at the sponge.

The music cuts off; the floor creaks. Mika pokes his head around the corner.

“So, how was the date?” he says.

“The what?”

“Your date, kitten,” Mika says. He nods at the baking tray. “Manon came by earlier. I made her take the rest away. My figure, you know, my figure.”

“What are you, a grande dame of the eighteenth century?” He feels a momentary pang at having missed Manon. She’s only a kilometer away in her beautiful new studio, but her absence in the apartment is tangible sometimes, a black hole: he’s always expecting to come into the kitchen to find her with the sleeves of her sweater pulled down past her knuckles, her fingers wrapped around a steaming mug of tea, gazing out the window at the fall foliage.

He thinks of Chloé in her leather jacket, hands laid flat across a bone-white tablecloth, smiling at him across a plate of pasta, the sauce red as autumn leaves.

—As red as the brickwork of her apartment, brilliant against the black pavement of a street he’d never visited before. A street that led him, step by step, to the bridge he would never normally cross, then or at any hour of the day. A million possibilities unfold: if he hadn’t decided to walk to the river, if he’d turned north to a different station, a different bridge, if the traffic lights had changed in another sequence, if he’d lingered a second too long in the supermarket, comparing soaps.

The thought of missing Eliott by mere moments, of Eliott slipping past him in the night, makes him want to double over in grief. 

“Well?” Mika raises his eyebrows. “Something to tell the kids and grandkids about?”

“It was fine,” Lucas says. He scrapes a crust of soggy brownie off the tray with the edge of his thumbnail. “How is Manon these days?”

Mika laughs. “So wistful! Honestly, Lucas, you act like she’s fallen into an abyss.”

“I miss her, that’s all.”

“And Lisa is a poor substitute, hmm?” Mika snorts. “Be thankful her rent comes on time, even all the way from distant Algeria, that’s all I have to say about that. As for Manon, you could make the pilgrimage. 8 Rue de l’Annonciade. Your feet know the way.”

“Again, _monseigneur_ , we don’t live in the eighteenth century,” Lucas says. He sets the baking tray on the stove to dry and crowds the dishes and utensils into their wire rack. Water splashes across the counter. “It’s not like Lisa is sending pieces of eight across the Mediterranean in a sail-ship.” 

“She would if she could—Pirate Lisa of Tripoli.” Mika grabs a dishcloth and starts to mop at the spillover. “So, no third date, then, with the young lady?”

“What?” Lucas says, pausing on the seam between rooms. “Who said that? I’m calling her tomorrow.”

“You sound delighted by the prospect.”

“I am, I am. Summer love.” He flicks the light off, ignoring Mika’s splutter of protest, and then he goes into his room and shuts the door.

 

 

He runs his fingers through the dust coating the top of his little three-shelf bookcase, his inheritance from Manon. She’d kept it stuffed with novels, Gothic romances and contemporary mindfucks, but it’s bowing now under the weight of his textbooks. He pushes these aside and roots around behind them to find the tatty, ancient soft-cover guide that he hasn’t so much as glanced at in years. He pulls it out and turns it over and over in his hands. _Mont Blanc: Hiking Trails and Environs_. The spine is coming unglued; the pages are dogeared, by Eliott’s or by countless unknown hands; the pictures are miniscule, printed in black and white. As he thumbs through it, a piece of paper falls to the floor.

He retrieves it, flips it over. The notes are scribbled in black pen, Eliott’s notes, dashed across yellowing Folie Douce stationery in gleeful, jittery strokes: _Goûter too crowded. Take Redhead route, cross couloir before dawn. Important! Sprint!_

Across the bridge, all the way to the metro—his bewildered feet took them straight past Station Ampère toward Bellecour—Eliott gushed like a spout. What he’d been doing in the years between, his studies, his work, his painting. How he’d had to repeat a year of lycée. All that fucking math had been his undoing, but it’s Lucas’ forte, obviously, how wonderful. How happy he’d been to see the first buds of spring unfurling in the trees in April; oh, what a long winter it’s been.

Lucas can barely remember his answers to Eliott’s rapid questions. _Paris Diderot. What kind of engineering? Uh—environmental. Yeah, solar stuff. No, with roommates. Two. Well, right now, one. Algiers. An industry placement._

_I never come this way_ , Eliott said, soft, wondering. _Never._

At the station, in the darkness between street lamps, Eliott had tapped himself, tapped his pockets, digging around for something to write in and finding nothing. _Fuck, I left everything at work. Anyway, tomorrow—_

Lucas replaces the note and the pen and slides the trail guide back onto the shelf.

_Tomorrow at seven, la Mimolette. You know it?_

_I’ll wait for you._

 

 

He brushes his teeth, he examines his face in the mirror, pushing his hair this way and that. He thinks of Eliott’s face, transported with joy in the moment of recognition.

In the east, the glacier is on the move, crackling and groaning across the valley floor. It spits out the corpses of long-lost mountaineers and alpinists as it retreats, leaving a tangle of ropes, of gear, of bright nylon jackets. Lucas stands in the rocky moraine at the melting lip of Mer de Glace. His heart rolls out at his feet, perfectly preserved.

Tomorrow, he thinks, tomorrow.

 


	2. le maître de son cœur

Now come the doldrums, the dog-days, of summer. What little is left of the slow-flowing, shallow rivers of Lyon seems to be in the air, moisture clinging to every twitch and breath. The city moves with primordial sedateness, as though encased in amber. Time passes in dollops, in individual droplets like the sweat sliding down Lucas’ back.

The mid-morning walk between the station and Avenue Albert Einstein is enough to drench him; then the air conditioning in the classroom of his English workshop fuses his shirt to his skin. They start with introductions, firm sticky handshakes. _Hi, I’m Lucas. Hi, my name is Lucas. It’s nice to meet you. It’s a pleasure to meet you. The pleasure is all mine._

_Hey, good luck tonight,_ Yann texts him.

_Thanks,_ he says.

_—Scared?_

He isn’t sure. There is a coiling tightness in his body that he attributes more to excitement than anxiety. He can’t keep still. He joggles his leg, taps his fingers. He checks the time again and again, on his phone, on the ancient analog clock hanging on the wall of the classroom, willing the tired hands to speed up. The biometrics on his watch indicate a slightly elevated heart rate. He recites dutifully: _I come from Paris. I live in Lyon._

He chose a maroon t-shirt that morning, the usual jeans, the sneakers that make him just a little bit taller—the ones Manon likes and that Mika teases him about from time to time. Deodorant and a dab of Mika’s cologne: prophylactics against the humidity. As he tied his laces, he remembered, with a hot lancing stab of humiliation, the care with which he dressed himself on another morning long ago in Chamonix.

He sniffs at his shirt now in a lavatory of the Humanities Center: patchouli and sweat, not a winning combination. His hair falls limply across his forehead; his eyes have a startled look. He grimaces at himself.

_—No. Not scared._

_—Good. Go get ’em, tiger._

_—I thought I was Sonic._

_—That’s only if you run away. And no shame in that either. Be safe._

_—Taking notes from Baz, I see._

_—Just looking out for my bro, bro._

Across the path, in the shimmering green in front of La Rotonde, undergraduates in theater are rehearsing an outdoor production of Marivaux’s The Double Inconstancy. Harlequin’s patchwork costume of rainbow diamonds, suffocatingly thick in this heat, glints and glimmers in the afternoon sunlight. The peasant women look cool and comfortable in their white linen ensembles, Silvia with a red apron, Flaminia with blue; the prince, amusingly, wears only a plastic crown above a tank top and shorts. His actor, a blonde girl with close-cropped hair, discards the crown in the grass to complete the prince’s disguise as a mere courtier.

“Now that I want to love you,” Silvia cries, “counsel me in good faith. If I satisfy my desire, will I do well? Will I do harm?”

She raises her hands in entreaty; the prince strikes a pose. Lucas leaves them gesticulating on the green and retreats into the air-conditioned sanctuary of the library. He finds an alcove away from the piercing light and tries to complete his worksheets. _What do you do for a living? I am a student. I am a student of engineering._

In the end, though, he can’t concentrate; he stuffs his papers away, grabs his bag, hurries back into the heat.

_Hey, cutie_ , Chloé says, blowing a kiss. _Are you free tonight?_

He takes the tram all the way down to Sainte-Blandine. There’s hardly any tree cover over the street, and the sun is merciless; the cross-breeze between the converging rivers brings no relief. He overshoots his destination and winds up at the very tip of the peninsula, watching as the mud of the Saône and slate gray waters of the Rhône meet and blend. The Museum of the Confluences gleams in the corner of his eye like a crumpled piece of foil. Its young garden is planted with saplings, some only as tall as Lucas himself and all of them apparently wilting in the brutal heat. He tugs at his collar, cursing his decision not to stop back at the apartment for a change of clothes; after all, he had plenty of time. At this rate, his underarms will be delineated with salt rings.

He retreats up the west bank and finds shelter in a café nestled between the warehouses lining the Saône.

_No, sorry_ , he tells Chloé. His café allongé arrives, steaming and bitter, and he sweats as he sips at it. _I’m meeting_ —he hesitates— _a friend. An old friend._

_Oh?_ Chloé says. _You didn’t even mention it yesterday!_

_—It came up suddenly. He’s only in town for the night, so…_

_—I see, I see. Well, have fun. Let’s do something this weekend if you’re free._

He hesitates, then sends a smiley face. _Okay._

She’s still typing as he tucks his phone away.

 

 

There are people busking around the Orange Cube, the five-story fluorescent monstrosity squatting on the bank: la Mimolette in Lyonnais parlance, after the ripe, bright, unabashedly orange round cheese, or, as Lisa and her gamer friends have referred to it, the Death Star. Its façade is a trypophobe’s nightmare, vast sheets of aluminum pockmarked with irregular clusters of holes, pierced on one side by a cone-shaped void. There are offices within and a rooftop terrace visible through the latticework, though at this hour of the evening, at this time in the summer, the building seems to be deserted.

“Know why it’s orange?” says a voice in his ear.

He twitches. “ _Putain_ , Eliott.”

Eliott grins at him. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He grins back.

Eliott rocks on his heels. His hair is a mess, his face flushed and gleaming with sweat. The tan that glowed faintly in the dim yellow streetlights of the night before is even more apparent in daylight: he looks almost burnished, his eyes shining like lights through a mask of gold. Under Lucas’ stare, his hands waver at his sides and then dive for the safety of their pockets. It’s a habit that Lucas doesn’t remember. The Eliott of the past, of his memories and his dreams, was a boy who made expansive gestures, who threw his arms out wide, embracing Lucas, embracing the world. The contrast makes his throat ache.

“Sorry,” Eliott is saying. He twists left, then right, wiping his nose and cheeks against his shoulders. “I had a stupid meeting…Valérie—that’s my boss—she likes to talk. I had to run like hell.” He speaks quickly. “I was worried—I thought—sorry if you were waiting a long time.”

“It’s okay,” Lucas says. “It’s hot today.”

“This heatwave is something else.”

“Yeah,” Lucas says. “I think the rivers may run dry by August.”

Eliott nods and jams his hands deeper into his pockets. He hunches. In the background, one of the buskers pulls out a tambourine, and the flat rattle of the cheap metal zills is like the noise of Lucas’ heart, trembling with every beat. Eliott’s gaze flickers left and down and away.

“So—” he finds his voice “—so why’s it orange? The Cube.”

Eliott glances back at him, brightening.

“It’s because this whole place, the docklands, the factories—all of it used to be orange. From the lead paint.”

He looks around: beyond the Cube, the world is green and white and blue, with trees, with grasses, with pavement and water and near desert heat. An oasis.

“But not anymore.”

“But not anymore,” Eliott agrees, eyes beginning to crinkle. “That’s definitely not environmentally friendly, is it, lead paint.” He jerks his chin toward the tip of the peninsula. “Have you been here before?”

“Yeah,” Lucas says. “Just to the museum. With my roommates last year.”

“It’s pretty cool. Like a cloud forming on the bank.” They both turn toward the wave of undulating silver. “And you stood on the roof terrace? What a view, huh?”

On a clear day, the full chain of the Alps is on panoramic display, Lucas remembers, with Mont-Blanc as the crowning jewel. He’d lasted all of thirty seconds on the roof terrace before fleeing back inside. Manon had found him later, staring a hole into a plaque about zebras.

_Are you okay?_ she’d said.

_The mountains give me vertigo._

She’d smiled, a little bemused, a little sympathetic, patted his shoulder. _B’en, Lucas, you can’t go around Lyon looking at the ground all the time. The mountains are there._

“Ah, I don’t think so,” he lies. “I think—it must have been raining that day.”

“That’s too bad,” Eliott says. “We’ll have to go up sometime.” Lucas glances at him; he’s gazing eastward, his expression wistful. “It’s nice, isn’t it, having the mountains—when it’s hot like it is today, you can just look at the snow and feel a bit cooler.”

Lucas turns west, toward the mud of the Saône. A tourist boat is churning its way valiantly south; the guide’s voice, tinny and warped, warbles out over the water. Above the heavily forested bank of the far shore, the sun is finally beginning to arc toward the horizon.

Eliott bobs in his peripheral vision; another rocking motion on his heels, a deeper hunch of his shoulders. “Have you had dinner?”

Lucas shakes his head. “Do you have somewhere in mind?”

When he looks back, Eliott is smiling.

“Yes,” he says. “The moon.”

 

 

He hears the fair before he sees it, carnival music being piped through impressive speakers, laughter and the cries of children seeping through the trees. He and Eliott turn the corner, and suddenly the tents and tarps of Luna Park burst into his vision, striped yellow and pink and purple, little alien huts strewn across the otherwise barren gravel of the lot, which is pitted and cratered like the surface of the moon. The air is thick with the smell of sugar and grease.

There’s a Ferris wheel, a carousel, an arcade, a funhouse, a taffy puller. A woman selling fiber optic wands and hats and toy helicopters notices his stare and starts toward them. He turns to Eliott. “Are you serious?”

“Of course,” Eliott says, crinkling. He waves the woman away. “Where do you want to start?”

The tickets are all digital now. He and Eliott collect a card at the entrance and load it with twenty-five euros, which is barely enough to get them through two rounds of Skee Ball, both of which Eliott wins; one water gun race, which Lucas wins; and one strike each of the mallet at the strongman game, where neither of their blows jumps the puck very high. They trade their paltry winnings for a single plastic ring, a grinning silver skull with red-painted eye sockets, and wander toward the food trucks parked at the edge of the lot. Lucas buys himself a panini; Eliott, a lemonade.

“You’re not going to eat?” Lucas says. His voice comes out more sharply than intended. He tries not to look at Eliott’s arms, brown and thin under his billowing black t-shirt. They’d both failed miserably at the strongman game, but Lucas’ strike had gotten much closer to the bell, and he hadn’t grunted as he hefted the mallet from its stand.

Eliott shrugs. “I’m not very hungry,” he says. He smiles. “It’s just the heat, don’t worry, Lucas. Here—” he holds out his cup “—have some.”

Lucas leans in and takes an achingly sweet sip. When he draws back, he finds Eliott staring at him. The ice in the cup sloshes.

“Ah,” Lucas says. He flushes. “Uh—sorry. I just—I’ll get you another straw.”

“No, no,” Eliott says. “It’s fine.” He turns jerkily to the left, spilling lemonade over his knuckles. “This way.”

Lucas takes a huge bite of his panini: drier than the Sahara. He gulps it down and follows Eliott back into the trees, where the path is lined with slabs of concrete.

“Stonehenge,” Eliott says, still with that nervous flutter in his voice; each time Lucas nears him, he dances a little farther beyond reach. The slabs near the fairground are bright with color, abstract shapes spray-painted in eye-popping hues of mustard and magenta, but as they wander deeper into the grove, the colors change; the shapes coalesce into scenes. There’s a black-and-white cityscape, a photorealistic image of two children on a swing, a pelican in a bowler hat, a dripping rainbow heart, a woman with a fish’s head, a round, bright balloon elephant and a single balloon rose floating into a blue sky. Eliott stops in front of this last slab and dips his head, looking shy.

“This one’s mine,” he says. “From a street art festival a few years back.”

He nearly drops the panini. “Eliott, fuck, that’s incredible,” he exclaims. The elephant, eyeless, is painted in bright yellow with a bold black outline; it’s beginning to deflate from the trunk as it spirals helplessly into the clouds. The culprit is one of four fat thorns springing from the side of the rose, which is itself so full and red and swollen that it looks ready to burst. The work is tagged with a single outsized _É_ in the bottom right-hand corner.

“It’s not bad,” Eliott says. He scuffs his shoes along the pavement. “I’m, um, I’m doing another. By a playground. A much bigger piece. That’s what the meeting was about, today.”

He traces the outline of a thorn. “More balloon animals?”

“A few, yeah. And some fruits. And nothing deflating. It has to be cheerful. For the kids.” His voice is sandy with irritation.

“But that’s not what you want to do.”

“Bah, well,” Eliott says. “I don’t mind. I don’t want to become known as the guy who does cartoon murals, that’s all. I want to do something huge, you know, something profound. The entire façade of a building. An image that stops people in their tracks, that people can’t stop looking at.”

“What else have you done?” Lucas asks. He ransacks his memory, examining brick wall after brick wall, all the tags and images decorating the alleys of his own neighborhood and of Villeurbanne. He wonders if he’s walked by one of Eliott’s pieces, unaware and unseeing, then dismisses this as impossible. He would have known. His heart would have known.

“Oh,” Eliott says. He shrugs his shoulders, gnawing at his straw. “Nothing really. Nothing in France, anyway, that hasn’t already been painted over.”

“Nothing in France?” Lucas says. “But—other places?”

He took a summer placement in the United States, Eliott explains, in rapid staccato. During his second year at the school of fine arts. There was an exchange program. The city of St. Louis—he pronounces it the American way, _Lew-iss_ —wanted a Petit Prince mural for their new library.

“It was my first time working on the side of a building,” Eliott says. “With the scaffolding and everything. I was strapped up to my neck in gear like a damn rock climber, I was so scared I’d fall off.” He mimes flailing, lemonade spraying the scrub at his feet. Lucas snorts, and Eliott giggles. “You think it’s hot here right now—St. Louis was like a wet furnace. And the Mississippi is seven times longer than the Saône and seven times as muddy, too. I was worried the paint wouldn’t dry.”

“That’s seriously amazing,” Lucas says. “Did you have to speak in English the whole time?”

“Oh, God, I did,” Eliott says, rueful. “An ordeal by fire.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lucas says. “So you can help me out when my fucking language workshop gets too hard?”

Eliott laughs. “ _That’s right,_ _Luke-ass_ ,” he says, in English. “ _Fuck yes, baby._ ”

“Fuck yes,” Lucas echoes, grinning up at him.

Eliott’s eyes glide along the edge of Lucas’ smile. His laughter falters. He veers sharply away. Over his shoulder, he says, “Do you want to go back to the fair?”

“Not unless you want to,” Lucas says. He tries to keep his tone light and playful, but the panini has sucked all the moisture from his mouth; his voice issues in a croak. “My pockets are empty. Another plastic ring will bankrupt me.”

 

 

They go north instead, talking about nothing in particular, teasing each other about their carnival failures, lapsing into peculiar silence at every crosswalk. It’s ten o’clock by the time they reach Station Perrache. The train that will take Lucas home is somewhere underground, biding its time. Their knuckles have brushed twice, with seismic effect; with every step, the city of Lyon seems to shake beneath Lucas’ feet. The whole of his body feels electrified. At the convenience store a block away, they’d purchased a pack of gum to share. Now they stand face to face beneath the hulking glass structure of the station, hovering in a vapor of peppermint, unable to look at each other, unable to look away.

“Well,” Eliott says. He puts his hands in his pockets. “I had fun tonight.”

“Me, too,” Lucas says.

“I’m glad—I’m so glad.” Eliott swallows. “I’m so glad to have found you again.”

His heart thuds in his chest, once, with finality. “Me, too,” he repeats.

“Lucas,” Eliott says, and his lips tremble around the syllables, and Lucas shivers, Lucas inhales, Lucas pushes himself up on the balls of his feet and takes Eliott’s face in his hands and kisses him.

Eliott makes a noise like a sob. Then he dives at Lucas, tugging him in, both hands slipping up to cup Lucas’ jaw, his body flush against Lucas’, chest to chest, belly to belly. _Lucas_ , he says, _Lucas._

And Lucas winds his fingers into Eliott’s hair and stands on his toes; he tilts his head back and opens his mouth and sighs as Eliott licks the peppermint from his lips. He doesn’t care who sees them. He doesn’t care about anything but Eliott’s arms around him, squeezing him until he thinks he’ll pop, he and the balloon rose together, as they spin into the stars.

 

 

He dreams.

The light shining into their room at La Folie Douce is blue and cold; it turns the column of Eliott’s torso into pure white marble. He’s at the door, tearing at his shoelaces, and Lucas is tangled in the bedsheets, unable to move, unable to cry out. In another moment, another heartbeat, Eliott will be gone; the mountain will take him. Panic floods Lucas like snowmelt.

_Eliott!_

He wakes to the sound of crickets and distant traffic. There is an arm slung across his body, heavy as a mountaineer’s pack. Eliott’s hair is soft against his shoulder, tousled in sleep. His mouth is parted, his breathing slow and even.

A pale sliver of light has evaded the curtains; it falls across the bed, across the slender points of Eliott’s fingers, the smooth shell surfaces of his fingernails, resting quietly on Lucas’ chest. Hours earlier, Eliott climbed into bed with him; Eliott cradled him in his arms, tickled his ears with those fingertips, kissed his temples, his throat, pressed his cheek to the top of Lucas’ head and held him close. Hours earlier, Eliott held those fingertips up to his own lips, snickering, as they tiptoed inside Lucas’ apartment, Lucas showing him which creaking floorboards to avoid. Hours earlier, Eliott rode the metro north with him from Perrache and jogged with him to catch the transfer, and he traced the lines of Lucas’ left palm again and again with those fingertips as their train hummed aboveground.

“I wanted to kiss you the moment I saw you on the bridge,” Eliott said, curling around him, hooking his bare foot around Lucas’ ankle. “And again at the Cube. In the trees before the carnival. In the gravel by the carousel. At each blow of the mallet at the strongman game. As soon as you drank my lemonade. Whenever you smiled at me. In front of my rose. At every red light. Lucas, it was unbearable.”

“You should have,” he said.

“I didn’t want to scare you.”

“Kiss me now,” he whispered, and Eliott smiled, and Eliott obeyed.

Now, awake in the moon-crossed darkness, he reaches up; with infinite care, he rests his hand on Eliott’s hair and feels the silken warmth of Eliott’s scalp. He wonders if, in the morning, they will be roused by birdsong.   

 


	3. le brouillard du Rhône

When Lucas opens his eyes again, it is daylight, and his bed is empty. Dust motes swirl through the air; molten slices of light cut across the bedspread. In the distance, a car horn sounds. Lucas sighs and rolls over.

Crunch. He sits up and finds a note on the pillow, a piece of good thick paper, depicting a scribbly pair of animals: a raccoon and a hedgehog tucked under a duvet. Beneath his illustration, in a hand even messier than that of his Folie Douce note, Eliott has scrawled an address in the seventh arrondissement.

_Lucas—_

_Come see me. Any time after six this week._

_You’re beautiful when you sleep. I wish I could have stayed to make breakfast. Missing you already._

_A lucky bastard (Eliott)._

Eliott’s sixes are formed just as beautifully as Lucas remembers. A burst of affection irradiates his bones; he seizes the note and presses it to his lips. He lies in the sun and is thankful. Then he swings his legs to the floor.

Mika is waiting for him in the kitchen, drinking coffee; he has the air of a predatory bird. “Congratulations,” he sings.

Lucas blinks at him. “What?”

Mika waggles his brows. “Don’t ‘what’ me. Your overnight date.”

He experiences a sinking sensation, as though his body, anchor-weighted, is plummeting into the depths of the sea.

“She tried to be sneaky about it,” Mika continues, and Lucas’ body rockets back to the surface as he registers the pronoun, “creeping out at the ass-crack of dawn, but I heard her shutting the door.” He sips, chuckles. “I was beginning to think I was living with a monk. Do you want to text Manon the good news, or shall I?”

His voice is low and cracked. “We—we didn’t sleep together. I mean—we slept—but nothing happened.”

For a brief moment, Mika frowns; then his frown melts into an expression of bland disinterest. His helpline face, his front desk face, but above the neutral smile, his eyes remain narrowed in thought. “I see,” he says. He dumps the rest of his coffee into the sink and turns to go. “Well, I’m off,” he says. “ _Some_ of us have to work for our daily bread.

“There’s more coffee in the pot if you need it,” Mika adds, calling from the entryway as he jams on his shoes. He taps the door frame in farewell. “But I suppose you’re well-rested. Better luck next time, kitten.”

He is, Lucas thinks, supremely well-rested. The weight of Eliott’s body soothed him, grounded him, banished the nightmare; he’s never slept better in his life. He whistles a bit as he makes himself breakfast. The kitchen seems bathed in gold.

 _How’d it go?_ Yann asks.

 _How was your night?_ says Chloé.

He thinks of the soft satin of Eliott’s mouth on his, the warmth of Eliott’s hands pressing his shoulders down into the bed, the smell of Eliott’s shampoo filling his nostrils, Eliott’s thigh between his legs. He leaves his omelet and phone on the counter.

 

 

All summer showers are a pretense—he’ll be sticky again the moment he steps outside—and this shower more so than all the others. He has himself in hand even before the first lukewarm trickle of water hits his chest, already beginning to pant. All the heat of July seems to be under his skin, building, boiling. He presses his forehead into the cool damp tile and strokes himself and gasps, and the rhythmic slap of his hand on his cock and the shaking of his breath rises into the narrow chamber like steam.

He thinks of the night before: of Eliott’s mouth opening under his, Eliott sighing, the mint on his breath, the lemon on his tongue, the taste of burned sugar. He thinks of the future: of Eliott’s teeth flashing whitely by candlelight, of champagne. How deeply they’ll drink of each other—the tautness of Eliott’s thighs being spread by his hands—the gilded arc of Eliott’s throat, the burning heat of his prick, the sweet scrape and scrabble of Eliott’s fingertips against the sheets, against his back, and, threaded through it all, a ribbon of dark velvet: Eliott’s voice, soft and furred and desperate, crying out for him. _Lucas, please, Lucas—_

He comes in an instant, his moan echoing into the vents.

 

 

He returns to the kitchen with his hair dripping, his muscles relaxed, languid from orgasm. Message notifications flash on his screen as he unlocks his phone.

Chloé: _Hope you’re not too hung over, haha._

Yann: _Yo, you alive, man?_

He thumbs past the old unanswered messages and dismisses them one by one. _How was your night? How’d it go?_ There’s nothing to say, nothing he wants to say. The memory of Eliott is for Lucas alone.

Three days ago, his father sent a picture of Ilaria, beaming in Florentine sunlight, and then a video: she’s just learning to walk, staggering determinedly along with her blonde curls bouncing. When she falls, she picks herself back up with little animal grunts. Anna is chuckling off-screen, full-throated. _An athlete_ , she says, _a champion, vai, forza!_

 _Adorable_ , Lucas replied.

_—You could have one of your own, soon._

He hadn’t said anything in return. Now he reopens the thread and writes, slyly, _Maybe so. I’m taking someone to dinner tonight._

His father responds immediately with a baffling string of emojis: almost certainly Anna’s influence.

_—That’s exciting news._

_—I’ll send you an advance on the rent money._

_—Take her somewhere nice._

_—Way to go, son!_

_Vai, forza,_ Lucas thinks. His first tottering steps. He turns his phone over, face-down on the counter, and eats his omelet. He looks out the window; he dreams.

 

 

He makes a reservation at Archange—two people, four courses, seven o’clock—and heads to his workshop. His mouth recites inanities about his studies and his family in English, but his mind is already hovering beneath the mural of the silk workers, where he and Eliott will stand after dinner, hand in hand.

He leaves promptly after class, returning to the apartment to dress. Eliott may laugh at his button-down, he thinks; very well, he’ll accept any teasing. As he fastens the buttons from bottom to top, he imagines Eliott standing before him in his bedroom, undoing him from top to bottom, button by button, with excruciating slowness. For every button, Lucas will receive a kiss. And then, when his cuffs have been undone, Eliott will turn Lucas’ hands over and press his lips to the undersides of Lucas’ wrists.

Still dreaming of the softness of Eliott’s mouth on his skin, he rides the train from Croix-Rousse to Hôtel de Ville, from Hôtel de Ville to Perrache, from Perrache to Debourg. From Debourg, his phone tells him to walk in a straight line. The evening air is dusty and sweet; the sun is only just beginning to set.

He passes a laboratory, a library, an optician, the brasserie, the chocolaterie, a bank, a fire station. Eliott’s neighborhood, he thinks, smiling at each edifice in turn; Eliott’s neighbors. Eliott’s street, Eliott’s corner; the trees beneath which Eliott has strolled in all seasons, the cracks in the sidewalk Eliott’s feet have skirted. The glass of shop windows in whose surfaces Eliott has been reflected.  

Eliott’s apartment, 26 Rue du Rhône, is an old white stucco building with wrought-iron Juliet balconies and sunflowers growing in an otherwise empty courtyard. All romance, but the side gate is more practical: gray-painted steel, buzzer equipped. The buzzer is of no consequence; the gate is ajar, and Eliott is just inside, wreathed in smiles. He leans forward to accept a bouquet from the dark-haired woman standing in front of him. She smiles too. She’s immaculate in her sharp burgundy skirt and white blouse, her matching blazer thrown over one arm, her shoes pointed and polished. Her face is flushed, with summer or excitement. Eliott kisses her cheek; then he throws his arms around her in a flash of purple petals.

Her hair is shorter now, cropped to her jaw and waving in the heat, but Lucas recognizes her.

He remembers her.

He remembers many things.

 _Mont Blanc: Hiking Trails and Environs_ lying forgotten on the bedside table, shining so brightly in the winter sun that the image of the mountain on its cover disappeared into a rectangle of pure white light.

The emptiness of the room after they took Eliott away, the haziness of its corners in his blurring vision. M. and Mme. Demaury: tall, leonine, frantic. Somehow everything had been settled before they arrived; they came with the ambulance, with a whirl of people and movement that swept through the room, flowing around Lucas, marooned on the bed, half-clothed, his knees drawn to his chest. And later, though not much later, came Lucas’ own parents, the Lallemants: pale, exhausted, torn with fear. He was alone by then, left behind and crying; while his father raged at the concierge over the telephone, his mother called to him, softly, and swept him into her arms.

He remembers, in the lost time between arrival and departure, Lucille as she was then: a pretty, older girl with dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. As solid as Eliott had been ethereal, and all of her vibrating with rage and despair.

He remembers how tender she’d been, and how the tears flew into her eyes as Eliott turned from her touch. She’d stayed behind to gather up Eliott’s things: his coat, which he’d refused; his shoes, which he’d forgotten. His backpack, his notebook, his phone, his pen. All the remnants of him, neatly and efficiently collected and bundled away.

Finally, she held her hand out for _Mont Blanc_ , and Lucas shrank from her, shrank into himself, tightened his fingers around the yellowing pages.

 _No,_ he said, _please. Please, can I just—_

_Just what? Keep it?_

His voice hitched. _I’ll—I’ll give it back later. I’ll send it to him._

He remembers the dark snap of her gaze, the way her lips trembled as she spoke. _Why? As a memento? As a promise?_

He remembers her plain dislike of him, and her fear.

 _You think he loves you? It’s fake. He can’t_ love _you. It’s just something he’s got into his head, okay? None of this is real. You, this, the mountain. You’re nothing to him. You’re just a fucking whim._

_He’s sick, Lucas. Sick!_

_You need to leave him alone._

But they had called her away, M. and Mme. Demaury, their voices thin and strained and echoing down the corridor, and she had gone, and _Mont Blanc_ remained and was his. 

 

 

Now, alone on the corner, he feels the phantom crumpling of the spine in his grip even as his feet shift on the dusty Lyon pavement. Lucille takes her leave, bearing north; she doesn’t see Lucas. Eliott doesn’t either: he’s smiling after her, cradling his bouquet. He pulls a phone from his pocket and taps at it with his thumbs. After a moment, Lucille stops in the street and waves without turning, with her own phone in hand, and Eliott throws his head back and laughs. He disappears into the courtyard. The gate clangs shut behind him.

Lucas turns south and starts to walk, and then he walks faster, and then he runs.

He finds himself in a park by the water’s edge, throwing stones into the Rhône. Less than a kilometer away shines the foil roof of the Museum of the Confluences, the Ferris wheel of Luna Park. Lucas turns away from these sights. Like a tap whose cross handles have broken, his brain is unleashing memory after memory, and the present is blurring with tears. The smooth, flat, sun-warmed stone in his hand becomes, again, the flaking edition of _Mont Blanc_.

 _What were you thinking?_ his father says.

Lucas’ eyes are swollen. He lets his mother cradle him and presses his eyelids into the cool springy material of her cardigan. He breathes through his mouth.

 _Plainly, he wasn’t thinking at all_ , his mother says. Her voice buzzes through his skull, boring a hole with wasp-like determination. He can feel the movement of her jaw against his head as she speaks. One of her palms curves around his ear, as if to blot out all sound. _And neither were you, letting him run off with that boy. You didn’t ask any questions, did you. I shouldn’t have listened to you. I shouldn’t have let myself be cajoled._

 _Yes_ , his father says sarcastically, _all of this, like the poor weather, has been my fault._

She ignores him. She strokes Lucas’ back. _Thank God you’re all right. Thank God._

 _Enough, already,_ his father says. _You’ll suffocate him._

If he had the guidebook in his hand now, Lucas thinks, he would throw it into the Rhône. He would weigh down his heart and cast it into the blue waters; he would sink his heart in a sack filled with river stones.

 

 

 _Do you want to get dinner_? he asks Manon. _You, me, Archange. At seven._

By the time Manon replies, his napkin is already in his lap, a waiter looming over him, a candle on the table guttering with soft warmth. Chloé runs her fingertip down the menu, pursing her lips. “Ah, I can’t choose,” she mutters, and then she closes her eyes and jabs at the page and picks the dorade.

 _Sorry!_ Manon says. Quadruple exclamation marks. _Just saw this. I’m getting drinks with the girls. Another time?_

 _Archange_ , she adds. _Fancy! What’s the occasion?_

The waiter clears his throat pointedly. Lucas shoves his phone in his pocket and requests Beaujolais for the table.

They would have ordered everything, he thinks. Guinea fowl, ravioli, quenelles. He takes the dorade too.

Chloé twinkles at him. “Good,” she says. “Now I won’t be the only one with a garlic mouth.”

The Beaujolais arrives. He drains his glass in five long swallows.

“Some hair of the dog?” Chloé asks sympathetically.

“Mm,” he says, noncommittal. He pours himself another, and then he dedicates himself to listening. Chloé is nearing the completion of a work project; her workmates are insufferable; her supervisor is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“I really needed this,” she says. “Thank you.”

The entrées are finished and removed; the cheeses are nibbled. Lucas waves away an offer of coffee. He drinks another glass. A plate of desserts arrives to share, and Chloé exclaims over them, cooing over the _Charlotte aux marrons_ in miniature and the rum-infused _douceur au chocolat_ baked in the shape of a star, with a trailing comet’s tail of hazelnuts and crumbled honeycomb.

Chloé tries a bit of everything, and then she holds out her spoon, smiling expectantly.

She really is very pretty, Lucas thinks, with her soft dark eyes and kind dimpling smile, her small white hands, in every way Eliott’s opposite: Eliott as he is now, bronzed and ice-eyed. If he kisses her tonight, she’ll taste like rum and honeycomb and garlic. If he kisses her tonight, maybe he’ll break the spell, or cast another, and fall in love.

He leans forward to take a bite of her chestnut cake. At first, he thinks the table is teetering, but he soon realizes it’s the Beaujolais. The bottle is nearly empty, and it’s all his doing. The cake is ash in his mouth.

If Eliott were here, grinning at him across the table, he’d drink a bit more. He’d finish the bottle and make Eliott take him home, arm slung across his shoulders, or his waist, guiding him across the cobbles.

Instead, he pays the bill; he helps Chloé into her jacket, a flimsy little summer slip. The thought of his bed, unmade, sheets still muddled with the smell of Eliott, eats at him like an ulcer, and so he accompanies Chloé on the métro to Guillotère and down the paved black streets to her apartment. They climb the winding stairs together, Lucas clutching the bannister in an effort to keep the world from whirling away.

At the threshold of her bedroom, he attempts conversation, stammering, drunk. Chloé just laughs and kisses him. He’s too slow to evade her mouth, but as her hands go to his collar, his buttons, he jerks back; he undoes them himself, roughly, tugging at them hard enough to loosen the stitches. With his shirt open and billowing, he touches her mechanically: shoulders, breasts. He rests his hands on her waist, not quite gripping, and she sighs and smiles and rubs herself against his thigh.

 _Fingers_ , he tells himself, _just fingers, just a little longer, and then we can sleep._

He imagines how she’ll feel, wet around his knuckles and squeezing tight, that little bit of her hard against the pad of his thumb, and he balks.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, clenching his teeth against a pulse of nausea, “sorry.”

In the toilet his vomit looks like old blood. In the mirror, his face is white, yellowing at the cheekbones. The face of a scoundrel, he thinks, a coward unable to sleep in his own fucking bed. The tip of Chloé’s little finger is worth more than the weight of his entire miserable shrinking soul.

He returns to her with bile and excuses on his lips. The wine, the hour, the weather, the workshop.

She folds him into her arms, pillowing his head against her breasts. “It’s no big deal,” she says. She runs her fingers through his hair, fondles his earlobe. “You can make it up to me later.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

“Hush,” she says. “Lucas. Sleep.”

He closes his eyes, feeling smothered with heat and nausea.

 

 

His phone wakes them at midnight. A blitz of text notifications lands at top volume, interrupting the drone of the rain outside: the heatwave has finally broken. Chloé moans and rolls away from the flashing blue light, murmuring in a tired little voice, “What…”

He grabs at it with a wild lurching breath bordering on a gasp, palms prickling with sweat. Eliott’s eyes are watching him in the dark.

_—Lucas, you never came._

_—Fresque des Canuts in fifteen minutes. Can you make it?_

_—Hurry!_

But the messages are from his father, awake in Florence with the baby, champion Ilaria, who refuses to sleep through the night.

_—So, my virile young man, how did it go?_

_—I don’t expect a play-by-play, of course._

_—What’s the lucky girl’s name?_

He’s missed a text from Mika, too. _I’m staying out tonight with a little friend_. Wink. _Don’t be too lonely, kitten. And learn from my example!_

Another shuddering breath, closer now to a cry. His head is already beginning to throb. He silences his phone and tosses it onto the floor with a thump—Chloé moans again in protest—and slumps back down.

“Nothing,” he says. “It’s nothing.”

Chloé rolls toward him and puts her arms around him, her head on his chest. Blindly, she leans up to kiss the apex of his shoulder, and the press of her lips is so tender that it makes his throat ache. Even so—even so—he can’t bring himself to touch her. He lies there, paralyzed, a lump in his throat, the fog of the Rhône filling his vision. He can see Eliott waiting for him on the far shore. For a split second all is laid bare—the sun shines down on a dry riverbed—and then Eliott is lost to him, vanishing into the mist. The wine carries him away.

 


	4. le pays des larmes

In the morning, the sky looks like a bruise; the world beyond the window is obscured by the storm. Chloé curls up beside him as water lashes the panes.

“Will it flood again, the Presqu’île?” she murmurs.

Lucas shrugs. He thinks of the sun-withered saplings in the Garden of the Confluences and hopes they’ll grow green and strong, nourished by all this rain, but it’s true: a year before he arrived in Lyon, a flood washed away the tip of the peninsula. A hundred-year-flood, so-called, that was in fact the third such cataclysm in ten years.

And yet they replanted the garden, they rebuilt the warehouses, and the water-logged floors of the Museum of the Confluences were torn out and replaced.

“Okay,” Chloé says. She gives herself a little shake and starts to sit up. “I’m sure you don’t feel much like eating, but why don’t I make you some soup?”

He tugs at her, catches her arm. Her skin is soft and cool to the touch, and for a moment he wants nothing more than to press his forehead against her forearm, close his eyes, feel her fingers in his hair. Guilt twists his guts. He pulls away.

“Don’t bother,” he says. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“Take a painkiller, at least,” she says. “Your face looks terrible.”

“Thanks,” he mutters, and she chuckles and finds him a pill from her nightstand.

 

 

The rain lessens long enough for him to make his escape, though not before Chloé has extracted a final kiss and a promise to meet up again when the weather is nicer. _Or, if it keeps raining, then whenever you are free,_ she says. _Row your boat to me and we can float through Tête d’Or with the swans._ By the time he returns to the apartment, though, the storm has resumed its ferocious beating of the city; the rain saturates him until his hair and clothing and skin can hold no more, and then water pours off him in rivulets. He unlocks the door, dripping, and opens it to find Mika shirtless in the living room, toweling off.

“Ah!” Mika says, pointing dramatically, brandishing the towel. “He is returned, the prodigal housemate!”

His voice twangs against Lucas’ eardrums. Lucas winces.

“Hi,” he says. “How was your night?”

Mika’s face falls. “Sub-par,” he admits. “He was an asshole. A total pillow princess, too.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Lucas says. He removes his shoes and squelches toward the sofa.

“Well, we live and learn,” Mika says. He intercepts Lucas with the towel. “Not on the couch, you savage! It’s damp enough in here as it is without the upholstery festering with mold.”

Lucas takes the towel and starts to wipe himself down. “Sorry.”

Mika peers at him. “You look a bit deflated, kitten,” he says. “Didn’t you have a nice time last night?” He pauses. He smiles. “With _Eliott_?”

It’s like being punched in the stomach. He can’t suppress the huff of surprise that escapes him. He tears through his memories, taking inventory: things said, things insinuated. _With Eliott. With Eliott._ A tremor runs through him. He does his best to hold Mika’s gaze; he fails.

“How did you find out?” he says, defeated.

“Your little love letter,” Mika chirps. Lucas glances at him; he’s looking quite pleased with himself.

He inhales. “So we snoop through other people’s things now—”

“You’re the one who left it on the counter, face-up for all the world to see.” Mika is unfazed. “An artist, is he? An illustrator?”

“ _Putain de Dieu_ ,” Lucas says. “An artist, yes. Well, it doesn’t matter, anyway, Mika, because I wasn’t with Eliott last night. And I won’t—I won’t—” he swallows to steady himself “—I won’t be seeing him again.”

Mika frowns. “Because?”

“Because it was a mistake,” Lucas bursts out. “Because it was a moment of idiocy. You know me, Mika, you know I like girls. I was with a girl last night. Chloé,” he says, in a rush, “her name is Chloé.”

Mika just looks at him, silent.

“This thing with Eliott, it’s in the past,” Lucas says. They can both hear the strain in his voice. His body feels hot; the rain is steaming off him. “Just—just a fucking whim.”

“A youthful indiscretion,” Mika says.

“A youthful indiscretion,” Lucas says, “yes.”

“Right, that’s complete fucking bullshit,” Mika snaps. “Manon and I, you must think we have the observational powers of a pair of bricks.” Lucas reels back. His face throbs, as though Mika has reached out and slapped him, and then he starts to shiver, the towel shaking in his hands. Mika continues, ruthless. “Listen to me, Lucas. The closet is dark and narrow, and it stinks. Don’t bury yourself inside. It’s the future already. You can be who you are and love who you want to love. No one will even bat an eye.”

“It’s complicated,” Lucas says. Somewhere in this vast pool of dark sinking shock lies a spark of anger, and he finds it and seizes it. “I’m sorry, you can gossip with Manon all you want about me, but I don’t want to talk about this.”

He throws the soggy towel down, spans the room in three strides, barricades himself in his bedroom. The floorboards creak, but Mika doesn’t come after him. Elsewhere in the apartment, a door shuts with a crash.

Eliott’s note has been placed carefully on his desk. His eyes rove hungrily over the raccoon and his hedgehog, over the letters of his name in the ragged capitals of Eliott’s writing. _Missing you already._

Lucas picks the paper up, intending to crush it and throw it away, but his joints have frozen. He stands there in the rain-streaked afternoon and holds the note in his wet hands—just holds it and breathes. When the ink starts to bleed, he swears and casts the note down, to save it, shield it: this, his last trace of Eliott.

 

 

It rains all weekend. Whether Presqu’île floods or not, Lucas doesn’t know. He stays indoors, secluded in his room. He paces and practices his English. _Photovoltaics. Ecotoxicity. Electrification._ On Monday, when the sun comes out, he takes his bedsheets to the laundromat, where the slamming of the washing machine lid is like the slamming of an iron door. On Tuesday, he praises a video of Ilaria, toddling with determination across his father’s Florentine pied-à-terre. He sends his mother a picture of his breakfast: another omelet. _My son the chef_ , she replies. _Are you going to make yourself a cake tomorrow?_

On Wednesday, his birthday, just as the summer heat begins to reassert itself, he and Chloé go to the botanical gardens at Tête d’Or. The roses are glossy after the storm, so full and heavy that they almost bow their heads. Lucas walks along this riotously bright, fragrant carpet of red and pink and yellow with his hands safe in his pockets, but Chloé is undeterred; she slips her arm between his elbow and his side and clings to him that way, rubbing at his bicep with her thumb. She’s taken the day off, and she’s practically bouncing with pleasure. She’s always wanted to go to the rose garden with someone, she says, “with my lover,” she says, and dimples.

“You know,” she continues, “my friends are all clamoring to meet you. They’re beginning to question whether you exist.”

Lucas grunts. He’s hunched over, chin tucked, shoulders jammed almost to his ears; he looks only at the roses at his feet. The saturation of color, the noise, the heat, the gentle pressure of Chloé’s thumb—it’s all hurting him, hurting his skin. He feels tender and newborn and frightened: a grub without its exoskeleton, ready to be pierced and picked apart at any moment by a cruel beak. He imagines his innards spilling out amid the roses.

“And your friends, too,” Chloé is saying. “I’d like to meet them. Perhaps we could arrange something. A double date.”

“Well, they’re all in Paris,” Lucas says. He says it with a heartiness he does not feel, remembering the voice of his father on the telephone long ago as he made lunch plans with a colleague. _Of course, of course. And how’s the wife? Good. Give her a kiss from me. Only joking. Only joking, Giannino._ He smiles like his father now: all teeth. The roses blur around him. “Let’s start with yours and see how they like me.”

“They’ll love you, I’m sure,” Chloé says. “In fact, they already do. Since I told them about Archange, _you_ are the archangel.”

He swallows. “Ah, yeah?” he says. “That’s misplaced faith.”

“I don’t think so,” Chloé says. She squeezes his arm. He sees the black flash of a crow in the trees.

 

 

They leave the roses and circle the lake. Its waters have settled; they reflect the blue of the sky like a clouded mirror. Lucas vetoes the zoo, to Chloé’s disappointment. They wheel southward anyway, toward the Allée de Ceinture, the Carrefour, the station at Foch.

“I have to go,” he says. “I have an essay to write.” He manages to sound rueful; it’s the truth, after all. A last-minute assignment from the professor that made everyone groan.

Chloé groans, too, softly. “It’s summer, Lucas,” she says. “Can’t you enjoy it a little?”

“I’ve enjoyed it,” Lucas says. “The roses were nice.”

“‘Nice,’” Chloé repeats. She snorts. “I hope your essay isn’t about poetry.”

“No,” Lucas says. “If it were, I’d be in…”

 _Trouble_ , he thinks, as they step through the gate, and he looks past the tracks of the little red train of Tête d’Or _—Children ride for €6 only!—_ toward the carousel and the ancient whitewashed building beside it, whose western wall is toothpicked with scaffolding and spread with tarps like flags. A man crouches at its base, surveying his paint cans.

There’s nowhere to go but forward. Chloé is wrapped around him like an octopus and pulling him toward the street.

Eliott is engrossed with his paints. For a moment, Lucas thinks he’ll escape, that they’ll creep by unseen. He holds his breath. Then Eliott looks up.

“Lucas!” he says. He leaps to his feet.

“Oh?” Chloé says. She pivots, and Lucas has no choice but to turn with her. “Who’s this?” she says, bright, eager.

The breath he sucked in is now trapped in his lungs, expanding with nowhere to go. He swallows and swallows again, his throat clicking.

He looks at Eliott and says nothing.

“Eliott,” Eliott says, after a beat. He’s wearing dirty white coveralls; he swipes his hand down one leg with an almost dreamy slowness before extending it to shake. Chloé beams and extricates her hand from the crook of Lucas’ arm. Eliott’s gaze flickers as he tracks the motion. The light seems to die from his eyes. “Eliott,” he says again, too loud. He touches Chloé’s hand, briefly, and drops his own back to his side, his fingers curling into a fist.

“This is Eliott,” Lucas says finally, uselessly. He sounds like a toad and he feels like one, too, entirely loathsome. “He’s—a friend of mine.”

Even as the words leave him, he wants to take them back, choke them down dry. He wants to turn tail and bolt.

Eliott’s head jerks back. His lips part.

Lucas is slipping, falling; he’s hurtling over a cliff into the sea, black rocks rushing up to smash him to pieces. Black as the pinprick pupils of Eliott’s eyes, which are staring at him, wide and shocked.

He’s looked like that before, Eliott. Long ago on a frozen morning.

 _I had an amazing dream,_ he’d said. _What time is it? Is it too late to climb the mountain?_

And Lucas said, flat and dull in the brilliant alpine sunshine spilling through the window, _Yes. And we need to stay here, Eliott._

_Why?_

_Because they’re coming. Your parents. And Lucille, they’re all coming. They’ll be here soon. Oh, Eliott, please don’t. Don’t cry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry._

“Eliott,” he begins, but the sound doesn’t make it past his lips. “Eliott—”

“See, you _do_ have friends in Lyon!” Chloé says, in mock accusation. “Cool friends with cool jobs.” She takes Lucas’ limp hand in her own and steps forward, smiling sunnily at Eliott all the while. “I’m Chloé. Are you painting a mural? What will it be? I’m so glad they’ve finally decided to do something with this old house.”

Eliott doesn’t answer. He’s looking over her head, down at Lucas, his lip curling, his eyes like flint.

“So this is why you haven’t come to see me,” Eliott says. His jaw is tight. His mouth quivers. His voice is thin and vicious. “You’ve developed a taste for little girls.”

He can feel the tremor going down Chloé’s arm into his.

“What?” she says. Her body is rigid. “Excuse me, what did you just—”

Lucas flinches. “Eliott,” he says, “Eliott, come on.”

“You can fuck off, then,” Eliott says, shaking, and then his face crumples, and he heaves a can of paint at Lucas, dousing him in teal.

 

 

The paint has been sitting in the sun; it envelops Lucas in a warm silky rush. The sun disappears as he closes his eyes. Viscous, the paint goops in his hair, his ears. He can feel it dripping down his face, his throat, his legs. Into the tops of his shoes. Over and through the hair on his arms. He is submerged. Dimly, distantly, he hears Chloé cry out.

“Are you crazy?” she shouts. Eliott doesn’t reply. His silence is absolute. The sudden loss of Eliott, of the sight and sound of him, spikes Lucas with terror. He swipes at his eyes with both forearms, trying to clear them.

“Eliott,” he says, helpless. Paint drips into his mouth.

Chloé’s still talking, her voice sharp. “Is this your idea of a joke? Lunatic!” He feels something warm and rough against his face: some part of her t-shirt, distorting as she tugs it up to wipe at him. “I’ll call the police!”

“Stop,” he manages, tasting metal. “Leave it, Chloé.”

“Of course I won’t leave it,” she snaps. “He attacked you!”

“Please,” he says, in a gasp. He shakes her off and takes one blind step and then another. He can’t see Eliott; he doesn’t know where he is. The taste of the paint is turning his stomach; his eyes are stinging. “Please, enough. Let’s just go. Let’s just—”

 _Call out to me,_ he begs, _stop me, say my name._

But Eliott doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t move, and Chloé hurries up beside him, locks her arm in his, whispers to him, guides him to the street.

 

 

Boulevard des Belges, Wednesday, at three o’clock. Lucas loiters on the sidewalk outside a café, paint drying in his hair, enduring the baking heat of the sun and the curious murmurs of passers-by. He looks down at his hands, coated in cracked blue. His nostrils are plugged with paint and mucus. He breathes in through his mouth, shaky.

The bell tinkles behind him, and Chloé reappears with a mass of wetted paper napkins and an actual terrycloth towel charmed from the baristas, some of whom are watching curiously through the window, their espressos forgotten. Her right arm and leg and cheek are spattered with paint, and a damp blue circle spreads across the stomach of her t-shirt like a wound. She hands Lucas half the stack and starts to brush at him with the terrycloth, daubing paint from his face.

His tears have left tracks; briskly, Chloé wipes these away.

He can feel his lower lip trembling. In another moment, he won’t be able to speak. He forces the words out: “Chloé, I’m sorry. I—”

“He’s not just a friend, is he,” Chloé says, quiet, resigned. “Lucas—God, Lucas. You _shit_.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and his breath lurches around a sob. “I’m sorry.”

“I was an idiot,” Chloé says. She’s beginning to cry, too. “I was such a fool. I thought you were _shy_. I thought you were taking things slow because you cared about me. I thought you were so wonderful. Lucas, I really believed it.”

“I _do_ care about you,” he says. “I do.” His voice breaks. “I wanted to fall in love with you. I thought if it was with you, I could do it. I could—”

“Do what?” she demands. “Pretend for the rest of your life?”

“Chloé—”

“ _Fuck_ , Lucas. You were using me. Admit that. Admit that, at least.”

“It’s not like that,” he says, “Chloé, please,” but she leaves him; she shoves the towel and the rest of the paper napkins against his chest and walks away, wiping at her eyes.

 

 

It’s rush hour by the time he finally stirs himself from the curb outside the café, cars blazing by at twice the speed limit, erupting into cacophonies of honking. For a moment, he thinks about throwing himself into traffic. It would relieve the pressure of his misery, he thinks, to explode into smithereens across the pavement, to become nothing and float away into the sky. Instead, he returns the towel to the café and goes home.

Le Gang have blown up his phone with birthday wishes. His mother has left him a voicemail. “Happy birthday, my son,” she says. “On this day, twenty-seven years ago, you changed my life forever. In the best way, of course. I hope you’re celebrating in good form.” She adds a few bits of news about an upcoming volunteer event with Secours Catholic, a soup kitchen, some meetings with other parishioners. “Oh, yes,” she adds. “I ran into Basile at the supermarket today. What a gentleman he’s become! As talkative as ever. I congratulated him on the engagement, and he let slip about a certain young lady. That’s news to me, Lucas! When will I get to meet her?”

He texts her back. _Thanks for your birthday message, Maman. About the young lady, it’s looking unlikely._

She responds quickly. _Why’s that?_

His hands are shaking. He takes a deep, long breath and then another. Chloé’s stricken stare haunts him, but he clings it, to the memory of her eyes, too frightened to look at what lies beyond.

_We broke up._

His mother starts to type. Lucas interrupts her.

_We broke up because I’m gay. I know it’s not what you want to hear. I’m sorry._

She’s still typing. The seconds drag into minutes. He thinks he might be sick. He swallows down a mouthful of bitter saliva and writes, _Are you upset with me?_

_—No, chéri. I just worry, that’s all._

_—After what happened on the mountain._

_—You’re young still, it’s easy to be misled._

_—In any case, don’t tell your father. You don’t want to give him yet another excuse to be late with your rent money._

_—I love you._

_I love you too_ , he says. He’s weeping again, the tears seeping from the corners of his eyes. He turns his phone over and lies down.

 

 

A scream wakes him. Mika has come home with a sackful of groceries, which he drops with a thump as he shrieks, with all the lung power of a prima donna:

“ _The couch_!”

It’s unsalvageable, Lucas thinks, stained and speckled with paint, dotted with drool from his slack sleeping mouth, and, what’s more, he’s glued himself to it, hair and t-shirt spackled to the microfibers. He unsticks himself with a crackle and sits up.

“Welcome back,” he says. His voice is raw and scratched. “What time is it?”

Mika takes one look at him and crosses the room, plopping down on the cushion beside Lucas, heedless of the mess.

“Kitten,” he says gently. “Did you have a fight with some stagehands? A paintballing accident?” He puts an arm around Lucas. “What’s happened?”

His entire body is starting to shake again. He crunches forward, huddling over his knees, and tries to stop trembling, but he can’t, he can’t.

Mika takes one of Lucas’ hands and squeezes it. “Lucas?”

“I hurt him,” Lucas says. “I was an idiot and an asshole, and I hurt Eliott.”

“Oh, kitten,” Mika says.

“He doesn’t want anything to do with me now,” Lucas says. He thought he’d cried himself dry, but the tears are beginning anew, molten under his swollen eyelids. His nose is a fountain of snot. He scrubs at his face. “He told me to get fucked. He—”

“Come now,” Mika says. He strokes Lucas’ knuckles. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it. I saw his note, remember, Lucas? He’s head over heels for you.”

“No,” Lucas chokes out. “No, Mika. You didn’t see how he reacted. I hurt him,” he says again, and the memory of Eliott bursts upon him: the iciness of Eliott’s stare, the jerky bob of Eliott’s throat as he swallowed, the trembling of Eliott’s entire body in the heartbeat before he lunged. The way his face crumpled. He sees it all in slow motion, the paint suspended in the air between them, blotting out the light. “I hurt him.”

He cries with Mika’s hand warm on his back, rubbing comforting little circles between his shoulder blades. Eventually, he resurfaces, groping around for a tissue. Silently, Mika hands him the box.

“I’m sorry,” Lucas says. “I was terrible to you. To everyone. I’ve been worse than shit, I—”

“Right,” Mika says decisively. “That’s enough of _that_ , Lucas.” He pulls his phone from his pocket. “Initiating emergency protocol. I’m calling Manon. And _you’re_ getting in the shower, kitten, clothes and all, and washing all that off. And then the three of us are going to sit on this artistically painted couch and watch one of Lisa’s weird science fiction movies and eat chocolate and get wasted. Okay?”

Lucas sniffs. “Okay.”

 

 

The next forty-eight hours pass in a haze, drowned in wine and sleep. On Friday, Mika and Manon throw a party at the apartment, a birthday celebration for Lucas, where all the guests are drawn from their own groups of friends, all smiling strangers: makeup artists and filmmakers and literature students, unknown to Lucas but happy to raise their glasses in his honor again and again and again. They clap him on the back, congratulate him, dance with him. He drinks until the star-spangled ceiling is spinning like a top.

All of the windows are open in an attempt to siphon in some of the balmy night air. With the churn of bodies in the living room and the pizza in the oven, the temperature in the apartment must be somewhere beyond forty degrees centigrade. Lucas staggers onto the landing. He presses his cheek into the cool stucco of the wall and sighs.

His phone buzzes. Le Gang have been texting back and forth all evening: some inanities about releasing butterflies after the wedding ceremony.

 _Is it safe?_ Basile asks. _For, like, the environment?_

 _And you call yourself a science teacher,_ Arthur says.

 _No idea_ , Lucas writes. _Fuck butterflies, anyway. Why don’t you use something original, like bats._

 _Fucking hell, Lucas,_ Yann says. _You’re writing in hieroglyphs. How much have you had to drink?_

 _Lots_ , Lucas says. _Too much probably. Bats, Baz_ , he adds. _Bats._

A few guests take their leave, flooding the landing momentarily with warm yellow light and pounding music. Their footsteps disappear down the stairs. Laughter drifts up from the street. Lucas breathes in the sweet summer air, the tang of sweat, the smell of beer. He looks back at his phone.

Eliott’s old number is still saved in Lucas’ contacts, along with his last texts, sent from an inpatient facility in the third arrondissement. Lucas walked by the building on his second day in Lyon, on his way to obtain a city card in Part-Dieu—walked by it and stared at it, at its imposing Gothic face and blank shuttered windows. The address is still in his messages; all he has to do is scroll up. He doesn’t. He stares at the last bubble on the screen, ten and a half years old.

_—Dear Lucas. Have you forgotten me?_

Seen but never replied to.

He replies now.

 _Dear Eliott_ , he says. _I haven’t forgotten you._

There’s no response, of course. He goes on, slowly, trying not to make any mistakes, but his thumbs are clumsy. His keyboard swims in and out of focus; the world revolves giddily around him.

_—I’m thinking of you every minute._

_—I want to see you._

_—Things ended with Chloé._

_—She didn’t throw anything. Paint, water, wine, or coffee. So that’s a plus. I guess._

_—It’s hot as hell in Lyon in summer, isn’t it._

_—I hope you’re well._

_—Sorry to whoever has this number now._

Then, as he looks on in disbelief, his breath stuttering in his throat, the messages are marked read one by one. A bubble appears, the ellipses stretching on and on.

 _I’m by the mural_ , Eliott says, at last. _For a little while longer. If you really want to see me._

 _Okay_ , he types, _the one in Tête d’Or? I’m coming,_ but his hands are shaking too much; he sends Eliott a tangle of nonsense.

“Fuck,” he says, and tries again: more garbage. Both messages remain unread. Eliott has probably put his phone away, Lucas realizes. He’s packing up for the night, Lucas thinks, tying down the tarps, shouldering his satchel, turning to go. One last lingering look down Allée de Ceinture.

Panic closes around his throat like the jaws of a wolf and shakes him in its teeth. He scrambles back inside the apartment on his hands and knees, gulping back his queasiness. He finds his sneakers in the pile of shoes by the door; he jams them on. His heart keeps the time. _Eliott, Eliott._ He drags himself down the stairs onto the street, into the darkness.

 


	5. le jamais de mon toujours

Lucas runs. He trips over the cobbles, drifts from one side of the pavement to the other, and falls and bangs his knees, but he doesn’t stop. He jumps through time like a knight leaping across on a chessboard: every time he blinks, he’s somewhere else with no memory of how he arrived there. All he knows is that his legs must keep pumping, that his feet must continue to strike the pavement and propel him forward, and that the path beneath his feet is lit with gold, guiding him through the city, toward Eliott. He teeters past the silk workers, the Church of Saint Denis. He takes a shortcut through the children’s park along the riverbank, setting off a pack of dogs in the houses adjacent, and bolts across the bridge, narrowly avoiding a car; it blasts past him with a howl of its horn and vanishes into the distance. Soon, the trees of Tête d’Or are rising to meet him on the opposite bank. He imagines the stars rushing overhead.

The gates of Tête d’Or are closed and padlocked. Lucas rattles them pointlessly and kicks them and curses, and then he finds the low wrought-iron fence along the western edge of the park and heaves himself up and over, scraping his palms as he lands. When he picks himself up, he sees the eerily lifeless animals of the carousel, abandoned for the night and, at the base of the mural, the round globe of a lantern, glowing like a full moon at Eliott’s feet.

Whatever progress Eliott has made with the mural is hidden under a tarp. He isn’t wearing his coveralls tonight; his t-shirt and jeans are black, dousing him in shadow. He doesn’t move, and he doesn’t speak.

Lucas sways closer, hands held out in front of him: for balance, or to ward Eliott off, or draw him in. He isn’t sure which.

“Please,” he says. “Please say something.”

“Shit, Lucas,” Eliott says, very faintly. “You ran like the wind.”

The sound of his name on Eliott’s lips is too much. Tears start in his eyes again: huge ocean drops, welling up and rolling down his cheeks. He reaches Eliott and takes two fistfuls of his t-shirt. The material is thin and yielding, bunching under his fingers. He grips it hard, and then he stands on his toes and presses his face into Eliott’s shoulder, which is damp with sweat. He breathes in.

“I’m sorry,” he says, muffled.

A shudder runs through Eliott’s body. Then his arms come up and wrap around Lucas, squeezing Lucas until he squeaks.

Lucas clings to him, shaking. He turns his head and whispers his apologies against Eliott’s throat.

Eventually, Eliott pries him loose; he holds Lucas at arm’s length and looks at him, his eyes glittering in the lanternlight.

“Lucas,” he says, “you’re drunk.”

Lucas chokes back a sob. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t do it to hurt you. I didn’t, I swear.”

Eliott brushes at Lucas’ tears with his knuckles. “Shh,” he says, soft. “Don’t cry.”

“Then tell me you forgive me,” Lucas begs. “Eliott—tell me you—”

Eliott kisses him instead. Lucas cries out into his mouth, collapsing into him. He strokes his fingers over Eliott’s cheeks; he holds Eliott’s face in his hands. Eliott’s arms are around him again, around his waist, tightening, heaving Lucas closer. When they pull apart, Eliott just holds him, forehead to forehead.

“I’m sorry, too,” he murmurs. “For the—for the paint.”

Lucas shakes his head. “I deserved it.”

“No.” Eliott rubs his thumbs over Lucas’ ears. He kisses Lucas again. “No.”

“It washed off, anyway,” Lucas says, “most of it.” Blue flecks of shame still stain his body—his hips, his wrists. For two days he couldn’t look at himself without wanting to cry.

“When I saw you with that girl,” Eliott says, “with Chloé—”

“No,” Lucas says, pleading, “don’t. I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Are you sad about it?” Eliott murmurs. “That things ended?” His hands stroke Lucas’ hair, slow and soothing. “You seemed happy together.”

It seems all he’s done in the last few days is cry. He’s going to shrivel up into leather in this Lyon heat and be put in the Museum of the Confluences as a natural history exhibit. He bows his head and sobs.

Eliott kisses his eyelids and makes hushing sounds.

“You can’t say that,” Lucas says, gulping. He squeezes Eliott’s collar in his fists. He has to make Eliott understand. “You can’t. None of that matters. None of it. Ever since I met you, you’re the only one who matters.”

“Lucas—”

The paint splatter is still there, dried, so dark it looks almost black, a little bit tacky beneath his knees as he sinks down.

“Let me—let me apologize to you properly,” he says.

Eliott tugs at his arms, trying to lift him up. “Lucas, no,” he says. He breathes in sharply as Lucas undoes the fly of his jeans and nuzzles in. “Lucas, you’re drunk.”

“You said that already,” Lucas reminds him. He grips Eliott’s hips and rubs his cheek against the front of Eliott’s briefs. Eliott jolts above him, biting off a curse. “It was my birthday,” Lucas says. “Happy birthday to me,” he breathes, singsong, and then he pulls Eliott’s prick free and kisses the bitter bead of moisture at its tip, runs his lips along the head, opens his mouth wide.

Eliott gasps above him. His shoes shift on the pavement, but he’s pinned between Lucas and the wall, with nowhere to go.

“ _Eliott_ ,” Lucas says, sloppy around his cock, “oh, Eliott.”

Eliott reaches down to cup Lucas’ jaw with shaking hands. As Lucas looks up at him, drooling, he shivers and moans. “Look at you,” he says, ragged. “Lucas, fuck.”

He tastes like salt against Lucas’ tongue, but the taste of him ebbs as Lucas slobbers and sucks and gasps, head bobbing.

Patches of memory assail him. The diamond-patterned bathroom of a gay club in Paris, years ago, the semester of Arthur’s Sexploration, an era Le Gang still speaks of with equal parts fondness and fear: the bathroom tile sticky under his shoes, the stall door flapping, the dandruff on the hair of the man kneeling before him, tawny hair slicked back. Every part of Lucas’ body had been taut and uncomfortable and longing to disappear. Later, he’d tried again with the girl in university, floating in a cloud of alcohol. He recalls the squeal of the mattress under his elbows and heels as he scooted back to accommodate her, Sara crouching over him, the black fan of her mascaraed eyelashes fluttering against his groin, the dry press of her mouth, all tentative licks and grimaces while the air filled with his own slurred reassurances, _you’re doing fine, just like that_ —

_Just like that_ , he said, and both times, both times, he thought about a world white with snow, about his ass sliding against the wooden slats of the train seat, the train rocking beneath him, the air cold on his naked thighs, cold everywhere except under Eliott’s mouth, all of him pinned by Eliott’s unbreaking stare.

Eliott’s fingers run through his hair and pull tight, dragging Lucas through mattress springs and diamond tile, back to the present, to Lyon and summer and the warmth of the sun still radiating out from the black pavement under his knees, and he moans and dives forward. Under the skin-bursting heat bubbling through his body weaves a deep current of regret, grief at the loss of ten years, ten years in which Eliott has grown distant and unknowable. He wants all of Eliott in his mouth now, wants to remember the imprint of him, hot and wet and hard and bumping against the back of his throat, every time he swallows.

“Lucas,” Eliott groans; he’s rocking against Lucas, fucking himself deeper into Lucas’ mouth in erratic little increments, legs trembling. “ _Lucas!_ ”

He doubles over, hands jerking in Lucas’ hair. Lucas pulls off and nuzzles at Eliott, feeling the wet slide of his own saliva against his cheek as he kisses the inside of Eliott’s thigh.

Eliott in his mouth, Lucas thinks. Salt pools thickly on his tongue and he holds it there, all of him loose and relaxed and blissful. _Eliott, Eliott, Eliott._

Eliott slides all the way down the wall until he’s sitting on the ground. “Darling,” he says finally, with impossible tenderness; he pulls Lucas forward into his lap and kisses him, licking himself from Lucas’ tongue. Lucas melts into the joining of their mouths, his mind emptied of everything but thoughts of stars. When he comes back to himself, Eliott’s hands are already on his jeans, fumbling at the button, both of them panting and finally sighing in relief as they hear the noise of the zip coming free. Eliott cups him in his palm as Lucas pulls at his own waistband and yanks everything down.

Then he kneels over Eliott’s lap and fucks Eliott’s stacked fists, slowly, languidly, hands braced against the wall, mouth dropping open as he watches his own prick slopping in and out of the circle of Eliott’s fingers.

“Eliott,” he gasps. “Eliott—”

“I wish the paint hadn’t faded,” Eliott whispers. “I wish some part of you would stay painted forever. So that whenever someone looks at you, they’ll see it—” he rubs his thumb against Lucas’ frenulum, hard “—they’ll see it and know that you’re mine.”

Lucas wraps his arms around Eliott’s neck and kisses him, deep and desperate, and then he’s coming, crying out around Eliott’s tongue, hips juddering against Eliott’s stomach, striping his shirt in hot little pulses.

“I am,” he says. His mouth drips over the syllables. His limbs are syrup. He’s drunk, he realizes. On Mika’s frightening cocktails. On love. Eliott holds him tight, whispering his name. “I am.”

 

 

Time passes. Stars and planets revolve. They gather themselves, wipe halfheartedly at their clothes, laugh at the synchronized sound of their zippers. They arrange themselves beside the tarp, Eliott with his back against the wall and Lucas with his back against Eliott, cocooned in Eliott’s arms.

Eliott presses a kiss to the top of Lucas’ head. “So it was your birthday.”

“On Wednesday,” Lucas says. Eliott’s arms tighten around him. “But we had the party today.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“Just a lot of drinking and bad music.”

Eliott chuckles. “My favorite kind of music.” He bends to kiss the top of Lucas’ left ear, and Lucas smiles and traces his fingers over the veins running along the backs of Eliott’s hands. “I owe you a present, then,” Eliott murmurs. “In addition to an apology for throwing paint on you on your birthday.”

“That’s okay. Really.” He twists to kiss Eliott along the jaw. “It’s enough that you replied to my texts. What were you doing here so late? It’s too dark to paint, surely?” He grins. “Unless that’s your technique. Painting by moonlight.”

“No,” Eliott says. “Just thinking. I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping well, these last few weeks. Of course, when your texts started to arrive, I thought I _was_ asleep. I thought I was dreaming.”

His grin fades. He squeezes Eliott’s hands.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had the same number?”

Eliott hesitates. “I thought it would—remind you,” he says finally. “Texting me.”

“Of Chamonix.” He hasn’t said it aloud in years. He says it again, just to test himself: “Chamonix.”

“Of—how I was,” Eliott says. “How I became.”

He can feel the air swelling Eliott’s lungs as he inhales: a long, long breath.

“I scared you, Lucas,” Eliott says. “I put you in danger.” His voice wavers. “I did things to you that…that you probably didn’t want.”

Lucas kisses his hand: knuckles, fingertips.

“Never mind,” he says. “Never mind what happened before. Tell me what we’ll do tomorrow.”

“Well,” Eliott says. He traces Lucas’ lips. “Tomorrow there will be fireworks. We’ll go to the sound stages. We’ll dance in the street to my favorite kind of music.” Lucas snorts; Eliott taps his cheek. “And then you’ll come home with me, Lucas. And spend the night, of course.”

“Of course,” Lucas says. “And the day after that?”

“We’ll sleep in,” Eliott says. “I’ll make us breakfast. Bacon and blueberry muffins.”

“Bacon and—”

“They’re good, I promise.”

Lucas smiles. “Okay. And then?”

Eliott tells him, low and soft. _Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow_ , he says, _and all the days after that. Lucas, forever._

 

 

He dozes. When he opens his eyes, the sky is beginning to lighten around the edges and no longer spinning. His legs are stiff; his knees feel bruised. He winces.

“Eliott?”

Eliott shifts behind him. “Hi,” he says. “The sun’s rising.”

“Yeah,” Lucas says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to…you must be tired.”

“Not really,” Eliott says. “I can’t be tired when there’s such a hot guy in my arms.” He laughs. His laughter flies across the park, thin and clear and unrestrained. It shakes them both and ripples through Lucas’ body like a cold wave.

“I should paint you into this mural,” Eliott is saying. “My little prince. I’ll put you on the side of this building and then another. And then another. I’ll start a series. It’ll be magnificent.”

“I don’t know if the city of Lyon would agree.” He tries to sit up, but Eliott won’t let him. “Anyway, what about your cartoon animals?”

“Fuck my animals,” Eliott says. “Fuck them. I’m sick of them.”

Lucas’ stomach flips. “Eliott—”

“Shall we climb up now and see?” Eliott says, nuzzling him. His skin is sticky with sweat. He’s giggling. “Up the scaffolding. Like the squirrels I’m not going to paint. We can watch the sunrise. Then you can point some buildings out to me—the ones you want your face on. Pick a whole bunch, Lucas. Old ones, new ones. Brick and stucco and glass.”

“Eliott, are you…”

“Come on,” Eliott says, “your kingdom—”

“Eliott!”

His shout cracks across the park. Shock loosens Eliott’s arms just enough for Lucas to wriggle free, and he falls onto his hands and knees and scrambles forward.

The pavement is warm and rough under his skin, but Lucas can feel himself beginning to lurch and slide across shifting ice. The darkness of the void roars up beneath him. He looks at Eliott, his stomach churning: at the thinness of Eliott’s limbs, at his shadowed eyes. The restlessness of his body, the dry glitter of his stare. His wild, jittery delight.

His voice seems to echo up from deep inside his belly. “I shouldn’t have come,” he hears himself saying. "I—oh, fuck. _Fuck_."

Eliott goes still. “Lucas?”

“Eliott, listen to yourself,” Lucas says. “You’re—you’re manic.”

“What?” Eliott says. His eyes widen. “Lucas, no,” he says, “no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I—I was joking, Lucas. About the murals. I was just joking.”

“You weren’t. You weren’t, Eliott.” He pulls away. He stands. The damp front of his shirt snags against his stomach, and he flinches. “You said it yourself. You aren’t sleeping. You aren’t eating.”

“It’s just my work,” Eliott says, a waterfall of words. “The mural, the—the—I have an exhibition coming up. I’ve been busy.”

“Eliott, we broke into the park,” Lucas stammers. “We—we—we fucked by the carousel. The children’s carousel. That’s not normal behavior. I—I drank too much, I wasn’t thinking, but _you_ —”

“Normal behavior,” Eliott repeats. “Lucas, you came back to me. Don’t you think it’s _normal_ to be a little excited right now?”

“Why?” Lucas says.

“Why what?”

“It’s been ten years,” he says. “Ten years, and we barely knew each other to begin with, we—”

“Lucas—” Eliott reaches for him. “Lucas, I would have died on that mountain if not for you. In another universe, I probably did. I probably smashed my head open falling into a crevasse.”

Lucas recoils, and Eliott takes a breath and goes on, more quietly, hands dropping back to his sides, “You saved me, Lucas. You saved my life. I thought—I thought I'd never see you again. That it was over. And then, on the bridge, like magic...Of course I feel connected to you. Of course it feels like fate.”

He can’t speak. The light of dawn is weak and watery and gray and beginning to warp in his vision.

“Maybe—maybe you don’t feel the same way,” Eliott says. His voice trembles. “Is that why you didn’t come to see me? Is that why you were—with—”

“I did come,” Lucas says. “The same day you left me the note. And I saw you with Lucille. I saw her bringing you flowers.”

Eliott breathes in again, sharply this time.

“Lucas—”

“And I couldn’t face it,” Lucas says. “I couldn’t. I—”

“Lucille and I,” Eliott says, rapidly, desperately, “we aren’t together. We haven’t been for years. Not since Chamonix and not after Chamonix either. We never got back together. She’s a friend, Lucas. A good friend, yes, a childhood friend, but that’s all, Lucas, I swear to you. And as for the flowers—”

“It’s not that,” he says. “That’s not why I ran.”

“Then—”

“I saw how well she knows you. And I wasn’t sure…”

“You weren’t sure that I was serious about you?” Eliott says. “Lucas—Lucas, I’m crazy about you.”

Lucas shudders. He’s surrounded on all sides by the deep blue ice of the grotto. The mountains are closing in on him like teeth.

“Just because I’m bipolar doesn’t mean my feelings are fake. In fact, it’s the opposite,” Eliott says, faster and faster, louder and louder, “totally the opposite.”

“I know,” Lucas says. “I know.”

He remembers the brilliant wide arc of Eliott’s smile, the way he’d opened his arms for Lucille and drawn her in, the way he’d thrown his head back and laughed. He looks at Eliott now, sleepless, frantic, shivering in the gray light of morning, and the memory of Lucille’s voice curls around him like smoke.

_He’s sick, Lucas. Sick! You’ve only made it worse. You need to stay away from him. You need to leave him alone._

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Lucas says. His chest feels like it’s being pried open, ribs cracking, his bruised heart steaming in the ice and snow. “I don’t want you to suffer because of me. I don’t want that—I don’t.”

“Lucas—”

“And no other universe matters,” Lucas says. “Only the one we’re living in.”

Eliott falters. “I’m taking my medication, Lucas. I see a psychiatrist. Twice a week if I have to.”

He can’t let Eliott touch him. If Eliott touches him, it’ll be over; his resolve will shatter like sugar glass.

“I’m glad that you’re stable now,” Lucas says. He clenches his fists and steadies his breathing and grinds the words out, each one of them white-hot in his throat. “I’m glad that things are going well for you. With your art and your projects. With Lucille. You deserve all the happiness in the world, Eliott. I—I—I don’t want to mess it up for you.”

“Lucas!”

Eliott tries to chase him, but he isn’t fast enough. Lucas reaches the fence and bolts over it. He can hear Eliott calling him all the way to the water’s edge. He runs until Eliott’s voice fades and he’s safe among the trees on the other side of the Rhône.

 

 

Soon after, the pain forces him to a stop. He folds over his knees, gasping, and wonders if his heart will burst.

It doesn’t. It sits inside his chest like a lump of lead as he limps toward the street.

The band of the horizon is turning pink now; he spots a jogger in the distance, bouncing along the pavement. He catches his breath on the front steps of the Church of Saint Denis and watches the messages as they flash across his screen.

_—Don’t do this._

_—Please don’t._

_—I told you I’ve been getting treatment._

_—You can talk to my psychiatrist._

_—Lucille, too._

_—Please, Lucas._

_—I love you._

_—I love you._

_—I love you._

His father has sent him a message—belated birthday wishes and a video of Ilaria, mesmerized by a sparkler. He watches it until the sparks begin to blur before his eyes, and then, slowly, slowly, he walks home.

 

 

The apartment door is unlocked. Stars droop from the ceiling; several more have fallen to the floor, which is littered with confetti, with bottle caps, with wrappers and crumbs. A pair of strangers are asleep on the couch in a heap of arms and legs. The kitchen sink is full of bottles and a toppled slice of cake lies on the counter. Mika’s door is closed. His own door is ajar; he twitches it open just a bit more and sees Manon sleeping peacefully in his bed.

She stirs as he climbs in beside her. “Lucas?”

“Shh,” he says.

“Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere,” he says, “the park,” and then he bites down on his lips, hard, to stop their quivering. His tears run sideways, across the bridge of his nose, into his pillow. Manon burrows close as he hiccups.

“Okay?” she murmurs.

“No,” he says. “No.”

“Oh, Lucas.”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he says. “I’ll be fine in the morning.”

The tip of her nose is cold against the back of his neck. “It’s morning already.”

He sniffs. “Then I’ll be fine in the evening.”

“I’m holding you to it,” she says, sleepily.

The Lucas of another universe is in Tête d’Or at this moment, Lucas thinks, at this very moment, as the sun rises, as pink as cotton candy. He and Eliott have spent the night beneath the trees. Now they creep out and remove the covers from the carousel animals. No woodland creatures here: they take Pegasus, his proud wings floating like clouds. Eliott mounts behind him and wraps his arms around Lucas’ waist; he rests his chin on Lucas’ shoulder and asks where they’re going. The Lucas of this inconsequential universe has an inconsequential answer. Eliott laughs. As if by magic, all the lights turn on, in the full rosy glow of dawn; the carousel begins to move, and they ride, they ride…

 


	6. la clef de mon jardin

La Fête Nat. arrives with fireworks and firecrackers being set off across the neighborhood in pops and bangs and whizzes. Each noise is like the fracturing of a serac in Lucas’ mind, a rockfall, a new danger. Eventually, he rolls himself out of bed, leaving his phone on his pillow. In the bathroom, he slaps cold water onto his face, he scowls at himself, he rubs his fingers tenderly under his eyes, where the capillaries have burst. He looks fey, feverish. _Enough_ , he tells himself. _Enough._

He and Manon nurse their hangovers in the kitchen, sipping slowly at mugs of coffee. Mika appears and threatens to make a cassoulet, nice and thick, a recipe from his grandmother, restorative in the extreme.

“In this heat?” Manon says. She droops forward onto her forearms. “God, you’ll kill us.”

“Well, take it easy, then,” Mika says. “And for fuck’s sake, hydrate.” He nods at Lucas. “You especially, kitten. If you cry any more you’re going to shrivel into a raisin.”

Lucas raises his mug in a baleful salute.

“It’s possible you live with an alien,” Manon says, as the front door shuts.

“Ah, now we get to it,” Lucas says, “the real reason you moved out. And why Lisa ran off to Algeria.”

“That’s right,” Manon says. “It was death by alien vodka, if I stayed.”

“Vodka,” Lucas echoes.

They both groan into their coffees.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Manon asks. She glances at the box of tissues beside them on the table.

“There’s nothing to say,” Lucas says. He pushes the tissue box away as deliberately as a cat, staring her in the eyes. “Just that I’ve been stupid.”

“Oh?” Manon says. “More or less stupid than the time you punched Charles?”

Lucas rolls his eyes. “I stand by my decision,” he says. “He deserved it.”

“Lucas…”

“Fine. Equally stupid.” He sighs. “Only this time I’m the one in danger of getting punched. By many people. And I’d deserve it, too.”

“I see,” Manon says. “Should we set up a queue for them?”

Above her smile, she looks worried, her dark brows drawing together. Her fingers are interlaced around her mug, squeezing, and Lucas pats them, carelessly, and just as carelessly, he says, “Really, I’m okay. I’ll get over it.”

His eyes are dry and stinging. When he closes them, he can feel the tears forming under his lids, pearly layers around grains of sand.

“I’ll get over it,” he repeats. His voice hitches. “I—I— _fuck_ , sorry. Sorry.”

Quietly, Manon slides him the tissue box.

 

 

Manon says her goodbyes around two. She kisses him on both cheeks and makes him promise he’ll come over soon. _And the fireworks tonight, no?_ she says. _Maybe_ , Lucas says. _Maybe._ He nurses the box of tissues. She kisses him again and steps into the blazing afternoon, and Lucas retreats to his bedroom and lies down.

His phone displays three missed calls. He hesitates over his notifications—twenty-three unread text messages—and then he swipes his calls open. The most recent one is from Yann, from 11:44 that morning. After a moment of paralyzed indecision, he dials back. It’ll do him good, he thinks, to talk about something else. Paris news, Yann news, wedding news.

“You’re alive,” Yann says.

“Of course,” Lucas says, baffled.

“Well, look at it from my point of view,” Yann says. “You drop off the face of the earth, resurface typing incoherently about bats, and then disappear again.”

“I was celebrating,” Lucas says. “A big holiday-birthday bash. All rolled into one. Cut me some slack.”

“Uh-huh. You never told me how that date went,” Yann says. “With your crazy girl.”

“Yann. _Putain_.”

“Well?”

He sucks in a breath. _Enough_ , he reminds himself. “Yann—about that.”

“Mhm.”

“It—it wasn’t a girl,” he says.

“Oh, yeah?” Yann says.

“ _Oh, yeah_?” Lucas repeats. His voice cracks. “Aren’t you surprised?”

“Lucas, you came out to us in lycée,” Yann says. “Don’t you remember? At lunch right after the winter holiday. Our first day back. You banged down your tray and declared it. And Baz made an ass of himself trying to get you to say which of us was the most attractive…”

He remembers: how blithely he’d said it, the lightness of the tray in his hands, his pleasure at their looks of shock.

_Yann_ , he’d said, _Yann, of course._

_Best friend privileges,_ Yann had said, grinning while Basile and Arthur pretended to rend their hair and garments in despair. And then they had moved on to other topics—football, chemistry. Two weeks later, he’d stepped into the void atop Aiguille du Midi.

“And then I never mentioned it again,” Lucas says.

“What, does silence erase the truth?” Yann says. He snorts. “It’s not like we needed a reminder every week: _Salut_ , _les gars_ , Lucas here, still gay.”

“Fuck, Yann. Come on.”

“And there was the time we went to that, uh, that club, with Arthur,” Yann goes on. “Fuck, what was it called? Pégase? Yeah. That one, the one with the cages and the risqué crown molding.”

“Since when do you know what crown molding is?”

Yann ignores the jab. “You vanished in the back for almost an hour,” he says. “You think we thought you were just taking a shit? Huh?”

“But I dated all those girls…”

He can almost hear Yann shrugging as he speaks. He’s using his reasonable voice, his social worker voice. “Well, bisexuality is a thing. Pansexuality, even.”

“Yeah,” Lucas says. His own voice is beginning to wobble. He stares up at the ceiling, where the plaster is stained from old water damage.

“So this girl that was crazy,” Yann says, “it was a guy? And he scared you off dating guys, is that it?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. And how’d the date go?”

In the reddened darkness behind his eyelids, he sees the soft glow of the lights of Pont de l’Université, the flash of Eliott’s teeth, and the Rhône, sunk low in its bank, flowing weakly toward the peninsula and the joining of rivers. He could cry it full again, he thinks, with all the tears he’s shed this week.

“It turns out he’s the only one for me,” he says, low.

“Well, that’s great, isn’t it?” Yann says. “You know, I was worried for a while that it was _me_ you were so hung up on. When you were wandering lonely in the desert. I’m glad that’s not the case. ’Cause I love you, man, but I don’t think I love you like that.”

“I love you, too,” Lucas says automatically. “But it’s not great. I can’t be with him.”

“Shit, bro,” Yann says. “Why?”

Lucas tells him. Slowly, haltingly. The story of Chamonix from start to finish, the story he’s never even told his parents, not when they’d demanded it, not when they’d begged—about the void, the glacier, the night of vigilant terror, when Eliott had transformed, into an angel, into an eel, into a ghost, and it had taken everything from Lucas to keep hold of him, to keep him safe from the mountain. He tells Yann about Eliott, his tawny hair like a crown: Eliott, king of Mont Blanc; Eliott, black-gloved, beautiful; Eliott the mad, madly in love.

“Fuck,” Yann says. “I thought—fuck, Lucas. You were really sad that term, I remember. But we all thought it was because of your parents.”

“Well, that too,” Lucas says, wretched. “It didn’t help. I mean, what happened on the mountain didn’t help. They blamed each other. Instead of—instead of blaming me.”

“And why would they blame you, hmm?” Yann says. “Tell me that. You were just a kid. You fell in love. That’s all.”

He tells Yann about Luna Park, about the first night, about Lucille and Chloé and the paint. The patches of second night beneath the mural at Tête d’Or, and the way Eliott had ranted and paced and squeezed him and laughed, and how, at last, he’d come to his senses, realized what he’d done. How, after everything, he’d taken Yann’s advice: he’d run.

“I won’t see him again,” Lucas says. “I’ll—I’ll delete his number, too. As soon as we hang up.”

“Because?”

“Because I’m _bad_ for him,” Lucas says, teeth clenched against the red howl of grief blooming between his ribs like the roses of Tête d’Or. “Because being with me will make him unhappy, in the end.”

“And you decided this all by yourself, huh,” Yann says.

He jolts. “What?”

“Lucas, you got wasted and jerked this guy around so hard his neck is probably sore today. From what it sounds like, he’s handling his shit pretty well. A psychiatrist, medication. A support system. You’re acting like he’s made of glass.”

“I don’t want to hurt him,” Lucas whispers.

“So you’re going to cry yourself to sleep and drink too much and live like a monk for the rest of your life? And make cute girls like Chloé cry too? Come on, Lucas.”

His pillow is still damp from the night before. He curls up on his side and breathes through his mouth.

“But—Yann—what can I do?”

Yann sighs. “Neither of you is sixteen anymore. You can talk this out like adults. _Sober_ adults. Okay, Lucas?”

Lucas, trembling, grips the phone with both hands, pressing it so hard against his ear that he thinks the screen will crack.

“I don’t know if he’ll give me another chance,” he says. “After—after…”

“ _Frérot_ , go find out,” Yann says. “You know what Basile would have to say about this. He’d say it right now in the group chat if you asked, but he took Arthur suit-shopping. Bam.”

“Bam,” Lucas whispers. He can barely speak. His voice is a thick nasal rasp. “So,” he manages, “Arthur won the position of best man?”

“He can have it,” Yann says, kind and calm. “Basile wants live swans at his wedding, and I don’t have time to deal with that nonsense. Fuck, Lucas, just wait until you see the frothy pink hell Daphné is putting Le Crew through. I’m surprised Imane hasn’t snapped yet.”

Lucas lets out a watery chuckle; then he sniffles and wipes at his nose with the back of his hand.

“Anyway, what are you doing?” Yann says. “Hang up and go get your man.”

 

 

His heart sinks as he opens his messages. Not a single one is from Eliott. The other missed calls are from his father, at nine that morning, and from Manon, from the night before.

_—Where’d you go?_

_—Daphné vetoed the bats._

_—Anna and I have some exciting news. Do you have time for a quick call?_

He does. He doesn’t want to think about Eliott, last seen at 4:22 a.m. “What’s the news?” he says. His voice is still a little hoarse, but his father doesn’t seem to notice. “Is Ilaria going to be a big sister?”

“Wow, Lucas,” his father says, laughing. “Is your summer course on the study of English or clairvoyance? You’re right on the money. It’s probably too early to be sharing around, but, ah—” his father coughs “—I simply couldn’t contain myself. Just think, Lucas, you could have a baby brother. Or two. It could be twins. You know my mother, your grandmother, was a twin. A boy and a girl pair, fraternal, that’s what I’d like.”

“Are you building an army?” Lucas says. “A regiment of Lallemants with which to storm the city of Florence?” He smiles, imagining it: an army of cherubs with golden ringlets, Anna in a war helmet, his father leading the charge, silver at the temples. “I’m happy for you, of course. You and Anna both.”

“Thank you,” his father says heartily. “But don’t take this as a sign of discouragement from your old man. You’re of an age where…”

The afternoon sunlight glances off the spine of _Mont Blanc_ as he turns his head. He inhales, wavering.

“Dad,” he says, too loud, too fast, “Dad—I’m gay.”

“Well, you can always adopt,” his father says, after a beat. “Or perhaps a surrogate…?” Another pause. “Is it the same boy?”

He sputters. “The same—”

“The one from the mountain,” his father says. “I remember his parents, the lawyers from Lyon. A formidable pair.”

“Dad—” God, shit, fuck, he’s going to cry _again_. “Dad—”

“I always wondered,” his father says. “Whether you’d kept in touch. When you decided to go to Lyon for this program, I thought maybe…” He trails off. “I was waiting for you to say something.”

“Dad—”

“We were thinking to come to Lyon at the end of August,” his father says. “Anna and I, and Ilaria. Before Anna gets too big to travel. Shall we have dinner together? The three of us, and you, and—Eliott, was it?”

“Yes,” Lucas says. He wipes his eyes. “Yes—Eliott.”

 

 

_—Eliott, I’m sorry._

_—Can we meet again?_

_—Just to talk._

 

 

The sunflowers growing in Eliott’s courtyard are two meters high now. The sun shines butter-yellow through their petals and sears Lucas’ face as he dials the buzzer for Apartment 16. No one answers.

He fights the crowds all the way to Tête d’Or, but the mural is deserted. The tarp, poorly secured, is peeling from the wall. Sunlight pools across the jagged folds of plastic, across the splash of teal on the pavement, across the glowing white-washed brick, where a raccoon and a hedgehog in space helmets are marching across the cratered surface of a desolate moon. Roses sprout in their pawprints.

_—Your mural is beautiful._

_—Please, can I see you?_

He lingers an hour, until the light turns golden and soft across the greenery of the park, and then he goes south, joining Manon and her friends on the banks of the Saône. They watch the fireworks; they chatter about literature; they dance. When it’s all over, the girls go out for drinks. Lucas walks home along the Rhône, looking at the glowing lights of the bridges strung across the water like constellations.

_Seven o’clock, la Mimolette_ , he writes Eliott, on Sunday. _I’ll wait for you_ , he says, and he does, pacing a groove in the concrete around the pitted orange surface of Le Cube. He waits until the sun sets, until the moon rises and the Ferris wheel of Luna Park is illuminated in the distance, but Eliott doesn’t come.

He goes back the next day: to Eliott’s apartment, to the Cube, to Luna Park. He stops at Station Perrache, at Ampère, Debourg, the University Bridge, the mural of the silk workers—at every piece of curb and cobblestone in the city that Eliott’s feet have touched and may touch again. He sits with Mika on the couch, where they watch rom-coms and listen to Françoise Hardy and ruin one of Lisa’s save files on a vintage video game. He visits Manon at 8 Rue de L’Annonciade.

He skips his workshop and travels Lyon in circles. He haunts the mural at Tête d’Or, which remains untouched and unchanged. A week passes, then another.

_I was an ass, forgive me_ , he says, but Eliott doesn’t reply.

 

 

On Wednesday, the first of August, ninety minutes after his workshop instructor has called him into her office to lecture him on his poor attendance, three hundred and sixty minutes after he learns that Anna is indeed going to have twins, and approximately 25,730 minutes after Eliott’s last message, Lucas accompanies Manon and one of her friends to an art exhibit on the Saône. It’s part of an ongoing series, the blue-haired Alexia explains excitedly, from the Museum of the Confluences: gallery space for young artists depicting human interactions with the environment. The last one was about floods, she says, and featured several installations with running water.

“And this one?” Lucas says.

“Impermanence, I think,” Alexia says, and Manon nods. “The impermanence of humanity, something like that. Impermanence generally, I guess. Of us and of this planet. There’s always an environmental angle.”

“And an Instagram angle,” Manon says, nodding at the people lining up to take selfies beneath a golden crown, spray-painted along the side of the warehouse. _#POLARIS_ , reads the little white plaque beside the crown.

“Speaking of impermanence,” Alexia mutters, as they dodge the crowd. “Are you ever surprised that Instagram has lasted so long? Of all things?”

“Aestheticism, Alexia, aestheticism,” Lucas says. “After you,” he says, and opens the door.

A blast of cold air makes his eyes water. The warehouse is divided down its center by a parade of blank columns. Alexia veers left, exclaiming at the wall, which is painted in the tromp l’oeil style of the mural of the silk workers, depicting three balconies, each level crawling with mountaineers. Lucas follows her a few steps, then stops dead. He recognizes it: a stylized copy of the mural adorning a building in the square of Chamonix.

Lucas knows the painting, knows it by heart. Three tiers, twenty guides. Lachenal, Rebuffat, Claret-Tournier.

_Spot the extra!_ a sign encourages him.

He’s spotted the extra already, in the top left-hand corner: Horace Bénédict de Saussure, in his eighteenth-century wig and breeches, his outline gilded with metallic paint, his body enfolded in the arms of Jacques Balmat. Inventors, explorers, alpinists—and now, somehow, anachronistically, lovers. Together, they gaze across the warehouse, toward the canvases on the right wall. The balcony around them is stacked with pots and pots of roses.

His all-knowing heart beats and beats and beats.

_It’s About Time_ , the plaque reads. _2029._

_Mixed media._

_Eliott Demaury._

Numbly, Lucas pivots right, toward a canvas where the ridges of the Alps have been reduced to a single serrated line. He sees the peaks of Le Dru and Aiguille du Midi thrown across canvasses of varying sizes in abstract, monochrome splashes, heavily textured and slashed by palette knives. He sees, rendered in stark black and white, the glass of a frozen valley. Turning, turning, he sees a throne of ice, another crown, he sees—

“But Lucas,” Manon exclaims, grabbing at his arm. “But Lucas, that’s _you_.”

The portrait takes up most of the back wall. He stares at his hair, lifted by a blowing alpine wind, at his bare hands, outstretched, at his smile, soft, tentative, trusting. He meets his own eyes, larger than life, shining across the gallery.

Manon’s cry has drawn the attention of a nearby couple. “My, my,” the woman says, turning to Lucas with a smile, “the muse himself makes an appearance!”

“Ah,” Lucas says, stuttering, “ah—no—well—”

More people have begun to notice; a few others approach, looking back and forth between Lucas and his portrait. The woman says something else, but Lucas is no longer even trying to listen. Beneath the portrait, he can see the tawny crest of Eliott’s hair rising above the rumpled black edges of his t-shirt.

Eliott’s back is to Lucas; he’s talking to an older man. The man is gesturing animatedly; Eliott is slouching, chin tucked, shoulders hunched. He scratches at the back of one bare ankle with a black Oxford shoe, taps his toes on the concrete floor. Lucille is there, too, Lucille in a black dress with huge teardrop crystals cascading from her ears, toying with a flute of champagne—and Lucille turns, and Lucille sees him.

Her mouth drops open. The champagne jerks in her hand. She jabs Eliott in the side. She lifts the hem of her dress; she starts to cross the room.

Lucas bolts.

 


	7. le toi du moi

Alexia yelps in surprise as Lucas barrels past, and Manon calls after him, but he doesn’t stop. He skirts the crowd and hurls himself toward the very edge of the river, slamming into the railing with a rattle and an _oof_ , and then he crouches down, folding over his knees, his sneakers. He grips the bars of the railing and flexes his fingers around them until the edges begin to dig into his palms.

 _Running away again, Sonic?_ Yann asks him, in the blank white panic room of his mind. He shakes his head. _Bro. We talked about this._

Five minutes, Lucas thinks, at Yann, at himself. Take five minutes, take a breath, take your heart in your hands and go back in, and beg, Lucas, beg if you have to. And if Eliott turns away—

If Eliott turns away—

“Lucas?”

She’s standing over him as he looks up, all of him pinched and pierced with dread: Lucille, suddenly as tall as the mountains and twice as frightening. Her dress is as black as wet granite; her crystals sparkle like snow.

When she looks at him, he forgets where he is: the pavement beneath his feet softens and distorts, and the mattress of La Folie Douce is sinking under him, throwing him off balance. The cold light of Chamonix dazzles his eyes. The empty corridor looms up beyond Lucille’s shoulders as she spreads her arms and bars his way.

 _Oh, no, no,_ she says. _You’ll stay here now. You’ll leave him alone now._

“I’m sorry,” he says, to Lucille as she was then, dark and angry. The smell of the carpet, saturated with nicotine and pot, surrounds him. When he looks at his hands, he sees them as they once were, pale, grubby, and useless, upturned as though in supplication. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was his exhibit. I wouldn’t have come if I had known, I swear. I—”

But the Lucille of the present is shaking her head. Her earrings shiver and shimmer like the surface of the river behind her, glittering in the setting sun. She’s disposed of the champagne glass somewhere, handed it to someone.

“Eliott told me he’d found you again,” she says. “Although there seems to have been some sort of misunderstanding. You know that he and I, we’re not together.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucas says again. “I know. It’s not that.”

She doesn’t quite roll her eyes. “I figured,” she says. “The two of you—” She breaks off and sighs. “Listen, Lucas. I want to apologize for the things I said in the past.”

“No,” he says, “no.”

“We were both scared kids,” Lucille says. “We were dealing with a bad situation as best as we could. But I regret how I behaved. I’ve regretted it for many years.”

“No, don’t, please,” he says. “You—you were right.”

“ _No_ ,” Lucille insists. “No, I was wrong to say what I said. Because it was untrue.” She looks at him, unsmiling. “I can tell that it’s still weighing heavily on you.”

“Lucille—”

“Come back inside,” she says. “Don’t feel like you have to hide yourself away. None of us wants that—not me, not M. and Mme. Demaury, and definitely not Eliott.”

Lucas swallows. “I don’t think he wants to see me,” he says.

“Doesn’t he?” Lucille says. She raises her brows. “You saw the last canvas in the series? The titular Polaris?”

Lucas startles, turning toward the warehouse. He thinks of the portrait, of his face, upturned, open, dazed, and longing.

 _Is that what I look like, Eliott_?

_Is that what I look like, when I look at you?_

Lucille nods. “Yes, the one on the back wall. It’s not exactly subtle.” She _does_ roll her eyes this time, at Lucas, at Eliott, at the world at large. Then she smiles. “When he paints, it’s not to forget, do you understand?”

All of Lucas’ memories of Chamonix are blue and white and desolate, smooth as the surface of the glacier: no handholds, just a long slide into darkness. He remembers Eliott in shadow, Eliott running from him, Eliott disappearing like the last thin filament of a candle giving way to night.

Here, today, on the humid, summer-sapped bank of the Saône, under the cool eye of Lucille, the ice in Lucas’ chest splinters and begins to crack, and he lets himself remember other things.

The iridescent shimmer of frost in the air. Eliott’s hands, woolly in their black gloves, the fibers turning gold in the light. The glow of the afternoon in Eliott’s cheeks, the brightness of his smile. Eliott’s silhouette, stark against the brilliant snow, and his eyes, shining and crinkling with pleasure: eyes bluer than the sky.

He remembers them together under the sun.

“You understand?” Lucille repeats.

The sunset is in his cheeks. He nods.

 

 

M. and Mme. Demaury mob him as he reenters; they embrace him and kiss him, left, right, left again. He goes through the motions, stupefied. They’re just as tall as he remembers, just as leonine, their faces perhaps a bit thinner, a bit more lined. Perfumed, poised, they lose their composure as they enfold him in their arms. Mme. Demaury squeezes his arm. M. Demaury pumps his hand.

“We never got the chance to thank you,” Mme. Demaury says. “For what you did…”

“You saved him,” M. Demaury says. “You, the man of his life.”

Lucille stands by, smiling benignly.

 _There’s no magic formula_ , she said, leading Lucas back to the warehouse with her hand tucked in the crook of his arm. _Be understanding. If he wants to sleep, let him sleep. If he doesn’t want to talk, don’t make him talk._

_There will be moments when you’ll feel powerless._

_But wait for him, Lucas. Because he’ll always come back to you._

_And enjoy the good times._

_The good times_ , Lucas thinks, as they all fall away: M. and Mme. Demaury, still patting his hands, Lucille, still smiling, himself, huge on the canvas above, all the bodies in the warehouse dissolving into a swirl of color and noise and then nothing, as Eliott steps toward him.

“Lucas,” Eliott says, in the roaring silence, “Lucas Lallemant.”

He’s flushed, flustered. His hands waver toward his pockets.

Lucas catches them in his own.

Slowly, the sights and sounds return—the low rumble of the crowd, the beaming smiles on the faces of M. and Mme. Demaury and Lucille and even Manon, who’s crept up beside him. And Alexia, too, grinning but confused. _Who’s that? Who’s that?_

“What have they been saying to you?” Eliott says. He tries to smile, but his lips are trembling. His hands shake. “What nonsense have you been spouting, _M’man_? Lucille?”

“Nothing he doesn’t already know,” Lucille says.

“Seriously, I’m happy everyone’s happy, but what’s going on?” Alexia says.

“Shh!” Manon says.

“Lucas,” Eliott says, light, nervous. He looks down and left and away. “I saw your—I saw your messages. All of them. I’m sorry. I should have replied. I should have. But I—with the show and everything—and everything…”

The world disappears again as Lucas strokes his thumbs over Eliott’s knuckles.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, soft. “When will you be free?”

“Now,” Eliott says, in a rush. “Right now.”

 

 

Side by side, Lucas and Eliott walk toward Station Perrache, while the sunlight gleams low and red through the trees lining the Cours Charlemagne.

“It’s true,” Eliott admits. His voice is thin and fluting. “It’s true, about the not sleeping, the not eating. I can't—I can't control it. Sometimes I'll sleep for a whole week. I won't do anything. Or I'll be excited for nothing. I'll just run off. Sometimes I don’t feel hungry, because of the pills. And sometimes I don’t take my pills. Because I forget, or because I don’t want to. Because I’m feeling good.”

“Yeah.”

“But I’m doing better,” Eliott says quickly. “I am. Lucas, I swear that I…”

“I know,” Lucas says. He takes Eliott’s hand. “I was wrong to say what I did. Wrong and cruel, and I’m sorry—I’m sorry. I understand now. You have a system.” Eliott’s palm is sweating against his. He caresses it. “You have people who love you and want to look after you.”

Eliott inhales, short and sharp.

“And you set phone reminders, don’t you?” Lucas continues, gentle. “About the pills? Lucille mentioned it to me.”

A tremor of tension releases itself down Eliott’s arm. Eliott’s shoulders relax.

“Yes,” Eliott says. He sounds sheepish now, and relieved. “Yes.”

 

 

They ride the metro north, emerge from Station Hénon, and stroll by the mural of the silk workers. Under the yellow circle of every streetlight, Lucas squeezes Eliott’s hand; Eliott squeezes back. They climb the stairs to Lucas’ apartment in silence, their footsteps slow and soft above the hum of the crickets singing in the grass.

The door flies open as they reach it. Mika charges forth with a jangle of keys, nearly bowling them over.

“Oh, kitten,” he exclaims. “I thought you were with Manon. Listen, I have to run. I’ve dawdled too long already. Manon called. There was an emergency in Presqu’île, and she needs me to…”

He notices Eliott, hovering behind Lucas like a shadow, his hand clasped tight in Lucas’, and his eyes widen, then narrow.

“Kitten,” he says. “A moment, if you please.” He smiles nicely at Eliott. “Excuse us. One moment, that’s all.”

He shoos Eliott into the apartment and shuts the door behind him.

“Fucking hell, Lucas,” Mika says. He raises his brows. “I can see now why you cried so much. Bah, I'm about to shed a tear myself over that face being off the market.”

Lucas flushes. “Yeah,” he says.

“There’s lube in my bedside drawer,” Mika continues. “Condoms too. Unless you’ve already got your own. Or you don’t want them.”

Lucas rubs the back of his neck. His face feels like it’s boiling. “I’ll—I’ll text you when we’re, uh. When we’re done.”

Mika rolls his eyes. “Don’t even bother,” he says. “I’m going to that fucking exhibit, I guess, whether I like it or not. And Manon is going to have a sleepover tonight, whether _she_ likes it or not. It’s her fault for resorting to subterfuge. Honestly.”

“Mika—” He clears his throat. “Mika, thanks.”

“Oh, kitten,” Mika says. He clasps Lucas’ shoulders and drags him into a hug. “I’m happy for you. Enjoy yourselves.

“No more tears, okay?” Mika calls, as he jogs down the stairs. “And no more paint, I beg you. Our lease will be forfeit. And the next time I bring a little friend over, I don’t want any complaints, it’s straight out the door for you. Understood?”

 

 

The front door shuts behind Lucas with a quiet sort of finality. The living room is empty and dark. He finds Eliott in his bedroom, thumbing through _Mont Blanc: Hiking Trails and Environs._

The floor creaks under Lucas’ feet as he comes closer, and Eliott looks up.

“He seems cool, your housemate,” he says.

Lucas leans against the door frame. “He is.”

Eliott taps _Mont Blanc._ “Do you know how big a fine I had to pay the library for this?” he says. He smiles. “I even produced a note from the hospital, but they were pitiless. It’s a first edition, believe it or not. If we took it back now, after all this time…”

Lucas hesitates on the threshold, taking it all in. Everything in his room seems strange to him now—Manon’s bookcase, the desk, the bed, even the black square of night visible through his window—all of it is warped and alien, bending around Eliott’s presence. Eliott, he thinks, Eliott here with me again.

Eliott’s smile slips under his stare. “Are you going to run again?”

It takes a moment to answer. He tries to be flippant. “I live here,” he says, “so, no. You’d be the one who’d have to go.”

But Eliott doesn’t laugh. He just stands there, watching Lucas, still and grave, hopeful and hopeless all at once, his fingers tightening around _Mont Blanc_.

“Because I won’t be able to take it,” he says. His voice is shaking. “I won’t be able to take it, Lucas, if you run again.”

Lucas goes to him. He tugs the book away gently and tosses it onto his desk. He cups Eliott’s face in his hands.

“No, I won’t run,” he says, quiet, as Eliott’s eyelids flutter, and his lips part, and he tilts toward Lucas, as helpless and yearning as the sunflowers in his courtyard. “I won’t run.”

 

 

He does have to leave, briefly, to retrieve the lube from Mika’s room. Eliott laughs when he sees it, soft and glad and a little bit embarrassed, and then he folds Lucas into his arms, cradles him close, presses Lucas’ head to his shoulder.

“Darling,” he says. “We don’t have to.”

Lucas kisses his throat, his jaw. He grips Eliott by the collar and lunges up on his toes to kiss him on the mouth, deeper and deeper, until Eliott’s arms are tight around him, until Eliott’s smile melts into a moan.

“I want to,” Lucas says. “I want to. Unless—” he swallows “—unless _you_ don’t—”

“Lucas,” Eliott groans. He sits down on the bed abruptly, as though his knees have given out, and draws Lucas toward him.

They strip each other with trembling hands, pulling their shirts over their heads, fumbling at each other’s jeans, at Lucas’ belt. Socks, briefs, the silver ring on Eliott’s finger: everything is removed carefully, tenderly. They look at each other, at the new lines of their bodies, at the tattoos on Eliott’s torso and legs: the barbed wire on the inside of his left ankle, the snake eating its tail over his right knee, the mountain range across his shoulders, the scribble in flowing script above his left nipple, so old the letters have faded into deep green blurs.

Lucas is marked, too, with new moles on his chest, on his arms, and with the patch of pinkish skin down his left flank, discolored all the way to the calf. From a bicycle accident, he explains, gliding one palm across the other, mimicking the short skid over rough pavement. _It wasn’t serious_ , he says, as Eliott looks at him in alarm. _I just went over the handlebars._

In reply, Eliott seizes him; he holds Lucas tight and presses a kiss to the very center of his chest, fervent. Then he lies back, and Lucas crawls atop him, naked as the day he was born, and slides his cock along the dip of Eliott’s hipbone, again and again, and licks the sweat from the hollow of Eliott’s throat. Their skin catches and sticks, and Eliott gasps beneath him and grinds himself against Lucas’ stomach and squeezes his ass, so hot, so hot, _Eliott, fuck, Eliott._

Lucas lifts himself up to his elbows, and Eliott pops the cap on the lube with a click, and says, dazed, “What do you…”

Lucas leans forward to kiss him. “Didn’t you say once,” he murmurs, “that you wanted to make me yours?”

“ _Lucas_ ,” Eliott breathes.

Lucas straddles him, hands braced on Eliott’s shoulders, and jolts as Eliott traces wet fingertips over his tailbone, down, down, and finally between. He bites his lip as Eliott breaches him, one finger at a time; he rocks, tentatively, experimentally, prick bobbing, already beginning to gasp.

“Lucas, Lucas,” Eliott says, crooking his fingers while Lucas shivers above him, “oh, Lucas, you’re so hot inside.”

“Yes,” Lucas says, “yes, Eliott—yes—”

Eliott pulls his fingers away—Lucas groans—and glops more lube into his palm. He slicks himself up, positions himself. Lucas grips the duvet in his fists and pants, open-mouthed, as Eliott presses against him, _into_ him.

“Eliott, _oh_ , Eliott,” he whispers. The slide is long and wet and thick. Sensation consumes him. His eyelids are heavy—he can’t close his mouth—there are stars in his stomach. “Oh, Eliott, _fuck_. Eliott, you’re splitting me open. Eliott, you’re inside me. Eliott, so full— _Eliott_ —”

“Shh,” Eliott says, and his hands shiver as they skate over Lucas’ back, Lucas’ waist. His eyes are so dark. “Lucas, take a moment, breathe.”

“No,” Lucas says. “No, please. Please, Eliott.”

He pushes himself up on his hands and knees, minutely, and slips back down, and they both cry out, and then Eliott’s hands go tight on Lucas’ hips and they do it again, again, again, together.

“More,” Lucas begs, “deeper, Eliott, I want—”

“Fuck,” Eliott bites out, and he surges up and over, bearing Lucas down onto the bed, hooking Lucas’ legs over his shoulders. For a moment he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t move, just stares down at Lucas and gulps for breath. He’s hard against Lucas, and scalding hot, and Lucas wriggles against him, reaches for him.

Eliott laces their fingers together. “Sorry,” he says, “I just—just give me a second. Sorry. Fuck, Lucas, I’m not going to last.”

Lucas squirms. He’s leaking against his own stomach, leaking and aching; he thinks he’s going to burst. He doesn’t want Eliott to last: he wants Eliott buried inside him to the hilt; he wants Eliott to mark him in the deepest part of his body, mark him and change him forever. But the words are as far-flung and difficult to gather as the distant stars, and desperate need closes his throat, and all he can manage, soft and pleading, is, “Eliott, _Eliott_.”

Eliott swears again. He pushes back in, hissing through his teeth. Lucas trembles; he pets at Eliott, at every part of Eliott he can reach, fingers outstretched and straining.

“Yes,” he says, “yes.”

Eliott goes slowly at first, sweating and biting his lip. Then he wraps his arms around Lucas’ thighs and starts to fuck him hard and fast, until the bed is creaking, until his hips are slapping against Lucas’ ass, and the lube is squelching, and Lucas is keening. He’s put his fingers inside himself before, rubbed at himself until he was tender and panting, but it’s never felt like this. Every thrust is hitting the spot behind his belly that makes his prick twitch and drip, that fills his body with fireworks. The room spins. Lucas cries out, ragged. _Eliott, more, Eliott, please, Eliott, yes._

Eliott drops down, hands on either side of Lucas’ head, bending Lucas almost in half.

“Lucas,” he says, “Lucas, oh, fuck, _fuck_ ,” and Lucas puts his arms around Eliott’s neck, fingers sliding through the sweat slicking Eliott’s thin shoulder blades, up into his wild tawny hair, and holds on. He stares up into Eliott’s eyes. It hurts to hold his gaze—the pain in Lucas’ chest is like a fist closing around his heart, _so tight, so tight_ —but Lucas forces himself to do it. He looks and looks until his own eyes fill with tears.

“Eliott,” he gasps. “Eliott, I love you. I love you. I love you. I—”

Eliott’s hips stutter; he slams into Lucas, once, twice, and then he groans, low and broken, and collapses forward, squashing Lucas into the mattress.

He fucks into Lucas a few more times like that, warm and deep and sloppy, Lucas’ legs bouncing over his shoulders and their mouths sealed together, swallowing down all of Lucas’ little cries and moans. After that, it’s a matter of seconds, not minutes: Eliott reaches between them and takes Lucas in hand and strokes him until he’s shuddering and sobbing and spilling across his stomach.

Then Eliott slips out—Lucas hisses—and they lie together, breathing hard, curled in each other’s arms.

“Lucas,” Eliott says, soft, wondering, and his breath catches, and he presses his face against Lucas’ shoulder. His tears draw hot lines down Lucas’ skin.

“Eliott?” A needle of concern sharpens his voice.

“Me, too,” Eliott whispers. “Me, too, I love you.”

 

 

They fall asleep. Later, Eliott will take him again in the darkness, lying on his side, slow and sleepy, breath puffing damply against the nape of Lucas’ neck, and Lucas will pull at himself until he feels raw and muffle his shout into his pillow, and then he’ll laugh, in embarrassment, in joy, and smile at the press of Eliott’s mouth on his shoulder.

In the morning, there will be coffee. There will be muffins. There will be open windows, birds in the trees, a soft breeze flowing through the apartment. There will be a long kiss by the counter and many more in the shower, where Lucas will show Eliott every part of his body the paint touched, and Eliott will bend to lick away the phantom traces. Under the slow trickle of water, Lucas will run his fingertips over the blurred letters of the tattoo on Eliott's chest; he’ll ask what it says, and Eliott will laugh and clasp his hand and tell him.

There will be Mika grinning in the doorway in the afternoon, and messages from Le Gang. He’ll send Yann a thumbs up and receive an _I told you so_. There will be a trip to the laundromat, or there will be a nap on dirty sheets.

There will be walks in the park. There will be arguments. There will be flowers. There will be late nights; there will be weeks spent apart. There will be dinners with Lucille, with Manon, with his father and Anna and Ilaria, heart-to-hearts with Mika, and game nights with Lisa, who won’t be able to believe Lucas’ luck. There will be a phone call with his mother and a lunch with M. and Mme. Demaury. There will be a meeting with Chloé in a café in Villeurbanne, tense and frightening, just as the days begin to grow shorter. She will forgive him, or she won’t; either way, he’ll linger on the bridge when it’s over, somber, silent, and feel the chill of autumn rising from the river below.

There will be Paris in October; there will be live swans; there will be Basile sobbing as he recites his vows and Arthur and Daphné crying along with him.

There will be exhibits, galas, murals. There will be snow. There will be Eliott reminding him to pick up a carton of milk and a bulb of fennel on his way home.

These and other fragments of the infinite future spread out and hover before his eyes. The ceiling of his bedroom is hung with a hundred thousand glimmering stars. He blinks now to dispel them. Eliott is in his arms, relaxed in sleep. His hand is still in Lucas’ hand; his legs are warm between Lucas’ legs. In this universe and every other, they are together.

The Lucas of this moment closes his eyes and dreams.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. If you liked, please [reblog](https://hallo-catfish.tumblr.com/post/184969178674/le-toi-du-moi-lyon-zetaophiuchi-ryuujitsu)!


	8. story notes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, everyone. Here are the (rather involved) story notes + playlist. Give 'em a read if you're interested in my ~process.

**Playlist—**  

[Lyon](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLisZ0QzyVVxDvTA7XHm7A_x2un5PzL7ky) (YouTube)

I’d love to go through each song line by line and point out the lyrics I felt were especially relevant, but we’d be here for another 25,000 words. Just give it a listen! I highly recommend "Le Chant des Sirènes" and Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” “This Old Heart” is definitely the song that starts playing as Lucas crosses the bridge, by the way. And we all know why “First Day of My Life” is on there.

-

I started keeping these story notes _as_ I wrote the story, that’s how unwieldy and insane my research was becoming. I think I had 90 tabs open across three windows at one point: at least 10 maps (of the districts of Lyon, the metro system, the INSA Lyon campus, the 4th arrondissement, the bridges, the distance to Chamonix, etc.), apartment rental postings, train blogs, INSA Lyon environmental engineering program details, a syllabus for summer English classes designed _for engineers_ , the history of Lyon, articles on the Confluence urban renewal project, on the public monuments of Lyon and Lyonnaise slang, on the effects of global warming in France and climate change projections, tabs upon tabs of quotations by Molière and Marivaux and Saint-Exupéry, and, of course, Google Translate.

(Ultimately, though, I don’t think I will bore you with these details—suffice it to say that the Internet is an amazing thing, and we’d all be lost without it.) 

Some particular challenges of this AU—

It was difficult to write the _near_ future without getting too speculative fiction about things. I love speculative fiction, but I didn’t want to jar anyone out of this story with self-driving cars or AI or even a humorous nod to the iPhone 20 or XX or whatever. I snuck in a line about some advanced biometrics, but beyond that—and mentions of unreasonably hot or unseasonable weather or an increasing number of natural disasters, or the inflation of certain prices—I barely touched on “the future” at all. 2029 is a lot like 2019, it would appear. (I mean, would anyone even remember the age difference between President Macron and his wife Brigitte in 2029? See the end of Chapter 1 for Arthur’s joke on the subject.) I will say that I took a peek at the Museum of the Confluences on Google Maps and saw that its garden was freshly planted, so I tried to envision what said garden might look like in ten years—that was fun.

It was also difficult to write Lucas constantly running away, though this was intentional to a certain extent—in Chamonix, Eliott is the one running away from Lucas, toward the train, toward the glacier, toward the mountain, while Lucas struggles to catch up. In Lyon, it was Lucas’ turn to flee. Many of you sent me keyboard smashes of frustration. I share your frustration, but I think it was necessary!

The takeaways for this story are Time, Trauma, Talk, and Therapy. Time lessens some wounds and makes others fester. Some people (Lucas) respond to trauma by trying to run away. I recommend talking to your loved ones about your feelings and your fears, and I also recommend therapy! I thought about, but ultimately did not include, a line in the epilogue where Lucas starts seeing a therapist of his own. I think Eliott will recommend it, though.

-

**Regarding the title and chapter titles—**

“Le Toi du Moi” is the name of a Carla Bruni song of which I am quite fond. It’s very cheerful, though, unlike this fic! But it's about things that complement one another—not necessarily two halves of the same whole—just things that go together, like Laurel and Hardy, blood and veins, and so on.

_t’es tous les éclats de mon rire_ | you’re all the pieces of my laughter  
---|---  
_tu es le chant de ma sirène_ | you are the song of my siren  
_tu es le sang et moi la veine_ | you are the blood and I the vein  
_t’es le jamais de mon toujours_ | you’re the never of my forever  
_t’es mon amour t’es mon amour_ | you’re my love you’re my love   
  
1\. Les éclats de mon rire: “Tous les éclats de mon rire,” or “all the pieces of my laughter,” is a line from the Carla Bruni song.

2\. Le maître de son cœur: This is from a Marivaux play, _La Double Inconstance_. The full line is “On n’est pas le maître de son cœur,” or “one is not the master of one’s heart.”

3\. Le brouillard du Rhône: This, at least according to one article, is from a Lyonnais saying, _Être dans le brouillard du Rhône_. “To be immersed in the fog of the river Rhône, means that you haven’t been born yet. You’re still in the misty amniotic fluid where it’s all cosy and you don’t have to cook for yourself" ( _This Is Lyon_ , "[Local Terms](https://thisislyon.fr/discover-lyon/lyon-sayings/local-terms/)," accessed June 1, 2019).  

4\. Le pays des larmes: From Le Petit Prince. “C’est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes”—it’s truly mysterious, the country of tears.

5\. Le jamais de mon toujours: _The never of my forever_ , another line from the Carla Bruni song. 

6\. La clef de mon jardin: From the soundtrack of the Petit Prince movie. “Tu as la clef de mon jardin, et ton sourire est dans chacun de mes dessins”— _you have the key to my garden, and your smile is in every one of my drawings_ —a line that is very Eliott, I feel.

7\. Le toi du moi—Carla Bruni again.

-

**Chapter 1—**

Chloé

I purposefully introduced her the way I introduced Eliott in Chamonix—the crinkling of the eyes, the writing in a notebook. Subconsciously, Lucas noticed and liked these things about her.

Pont de l’Université  

> The flow of traffic and the noise of students and diners, the clattering utensils, the laughter, the horns and the crosswalk chirps rise to a fever pitch and dim into silence. A cyclist flashes past on the other side of the bridge, a smear of neon, and then he is utterly alone.

In Chamonix, Lucas was alone in the Void when he met Eliott. I wanted a similar atmosphere for their second meeting.       

> Pont de l’Université is a belt across the belly of the world.

A small nod to the Petite Ceinture (little belt)—but also to the idea of being suspended between life and death, the past and the future, walking alone on a path suffused by darkness, etc.

Eliott     

> He looks exactly the same in the soft lights lining the bridge, untouched by the march of time—preserved in ice, Lucas thinks, a prisoner of the fairies…

In 2014, the body of a young man who went missing on Mont Blanc was discovered preserved in the ice of the Talèfre glacier (“[Mont Blanc mountaineer's frozen body…](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/09/mont-blanc-mountaineer-patrice-hyvert-frozen-body-discovered-32-years-missing),” The Guardian, July 9, 2014). His father described the discovery as “a body blow like a ‘second death.’” I was thinking of this and of The Snow Queen and Tam Lin as I wrote these lines.

The Mural of the Silk Workers ([ _F_ _resque des Canuts_](http://jeanpierrekosinski.over-blog.net/2015/11/le-mur-peint-des-canuts-a-lyon.html))

Amazingly, there’s a Chamonix connection here too, which I had not known when I chose this neighborhood for Lucas’ apartment. The muralist, Patrick Commecy, also created the trompe l’oeil mural in the square of Chamonix, “The Mountain Guides.” See notes on Chapter 6 for further discussion.

Brownies 

I spent almost 30 minutes trying to figure out whether French people ate brownies. Then (weeks after the story was finished) FLWhite showed me an IG story from S3 where Yann commented on the price of brownie ice cream in a convenience store, so I guess the answer is yes. Lol.

_ Mont Blanc: Hiking Trails and Environs _

Credit goes to [FLWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite) for coming up with this idea in their Chamonix companion fic, [_Pour des couronnes de glace_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18226214). I love the idea of this old book as a totem, this one last link to the past. It’s much more substantial than a ticket stub.

Last lines 

My absolute favorite lines from this chapter were about the glacier.  

> In the east, the glacier is on the move, crackling and groaning across the valley floor. It spits out the corpses of long-lost mountaineers and alpinists as it retreats, leaving a tangle of ropes, of gear, of bright nylon jackets. Lucas stands in the rocky moraine at the melting lip of Mer de Glace. His heart rolls out at his feet, perfectly preserved.

**Chapter 2—**

And now, the weather   

> Now come the doldrums, the dog-days, of summer. What little is left of the slow-flowing, shallow rivers of Lyon seems to be in the air, moisture clinging to every twitch and breath. The city moves with primordial sedateness, as though encased in amber. Time passes in dollops, in individual droplets like the sweat sliding down Lucas’ back.

I do so love descriptions of weather. And of course the weather is a metaphor for Lucas’ feelings throughout this story—the thawing of the ice, the drought, the epic rainfall, the humidity, the flooding. All of it is meant to feel elemental and overwhelming.

He can’t keep still  

> There is a coiling tightness in his body that he attributes more to excitement than anxiety. He can’t keep still. He joggles his leg, taps his fingers.

A call-back, however weak, to Eliott’s inability to sit still in part two of Chamonix, as they ride the gondola down to Mer de Glace.

It came up suddenly 

>   _—It came up suddenly. He’s only in town for the night, so…_

Lucas lies in his text messages to Chloé, another echo of his lies in Chamonix, where he told his father Eliott would only be staying another day.

If I satisfy my desire, will I do well? Will I do harm?

As in Chapter 1 with Mama Lallemant’s Bible verse ( _Let love be genuine, Romans 12:9_ , just after his second date with Chloé), I have Lucas overhearing some dialogue that is directly relevant to his situation as he wanders across the green on campus.

These lines from the Marivaux play ( _La Double Inconstance_ ) were pumped through Google Translate, and I’m not sure how accurate they are.    

> SILVIA.
> 
> Hum, vous n’êtes pas si savant que vous le croyez ; ne vous vantez pas tant. Mais, dites-moi ; vous êtes un honnête homme, et je suis sûre que vous me direz la vérité : vous savez comme je suis avec Arlequin ; à présent, prenez que j’ai envie de vous aimer : si je contentais mon envie, ferais-je bien ? ferais-je mal ? Là, conseillez-moi dans la bonne foi.
> 
> Hm, you are not as learned as you believe; do not boast so much. But, tell me; you are an honest man, and I am sure you will tell me the truth: you know how I am with Arlequin; at present, take that I want to love you: if I were to satisfy my desire, would I do well? would I do harm? There, counsel me in good faith.
> 
> LE PRINCE.
> 
> Comme on n’est pas le maître de son cœur, si vous aviez envie de m’aimer, vous seriez en droit de vous satisfaire ; voilà mon sentiment.
> 
> As one is not the master of one’s heart, if you wanted to love me, you would be entitled to satisfy yourself; that’s my feeling.

This is Lucas’ question, too. He wants to love Eliott, but he worries that his coming back into Eliott’s life will do harm—both to himself and to Eliott.

Crucially, _The Double Inconstancy_ involves some partner swapping (Silvia leaves Arlequin for the Prince, and Arlequin and Flaminia become lovers), which may become more relevant in the future, if FLWhite and I ever finish writing the third (much more lighthearted) part of this series, Paris!

Pockets 

Every time Eliott puts his hands in his pockets (as in S3, too—remember "On verra bien non"), it’s because he wants desperately to touch Lucas and has to find a way to stop himself. 

Lemonade

A reference, in part, to James Bay's song, "Pink Lemonade" (see playlist), which goes,  _Don't fall into my arms / don't ask me to repeat it / don't suffocate my heart / I don't know what I'm feeling_ , and later,  _I wanna drink pink lemonade watching movie trailers 'till's late..._

 _The_ perfect pining song, I think.

Birdsong   

> Now, awake in the moon-crossed darkness, he reaches up; with infinite care, he rests his hand on Eliott’s hair and feels the silken warmth of Eliott’s scalp. He wonders if, in the morning, they will be roused by birdsong.

Another reference to Chamonix, this time to the closing lines, where…    

> The Lucas of another universe is lying awake, too, but it is dawn, it is summer, there are birds burbling in the trees, the body of the man he loves is asleep beside him, he is utterly carefree and **his heart sings with the chaffinches**. When the sun rises, they’ll have breakfast. In another moment he’ll roll over, kiss his man on the forehead, and rejoin him in sleep.

You think all is well now, but of course there are still five chapters to go…

**Chapter 3—**

Eliott’s neighborhood     

> He passes a laboratory, a library, an optician, the brasserie, the chocolaterie, a bank, a fire station. Eliott’s neighborhood, he thinks, smiling at each edifice in turn; Eliott’s neighbors. Eliott’s street, Eliott’s corner; the trees beneath which Eliott has strolled in all seasons, the cracks in the sidewalk Eliott’s feet have skirted. The glass of shop windows in whose surfaces Eliott has been reflected. 

In the last chapter of _Call Me By Your Name_ , Elio describes the parts and people of his lover’s unknown life as follows:      

> Oliver wife. Oliver sons. Oliver pets. Oliver study, desk, book, world, life.

I thought it was very beautiful. And wistful. So— _Eliott neighbors, Eliott street, Eliott corner, Eliott trees, sidewalk, windows._

Le brouillard du Rhône

The full phrase, as explained earlier, is "Être dans le brouillard du Rhône"—to be naive, not fully developed, nascent (I think). Lucas' somewhat naive assumption that he and Eliott can start again (with dinner, with kisses on the wrists, and no explanation to Chloé) is shattered when he sees Lucille and has, essentially, a PTSD flashback to the aftermath of Chamonix. There are several nods to the Rhône and mist here—mentions of the actual river plus Lucas' fog of tears plus the address of Eliott's apartment, which is 26 Rue du Rhône.

**Chapter 4—**

The flood   

> And yet they replanted the garden, they rebuilt the warehouses, and the water-logged floors of the Museum of the Confluences were torn out and replaced. 

You see, Lucas, there is life after disaster! 

Allée de Ceinture

Another Petite Ceinture reference. Can’t get enough. Also, it’s a real street (lane?) along the southern edge of Tête d'Or. 

The rain and the paint 

> …the rain saturates him until his hair and clothing and skin can hold no more, and then water pours off him in rivulets.
> 
> The paint has been sitting in the sun; it envelops Lucas in a warm silky rush. The sun disappears as he closes his eyes. Viscous, the paint goops in his hair, his ears. He can feel it dripping down his face, his throat, his legs. Into the tops of his shoes. Over and through the hair on his arms. He is submerged. 

More metaphors. He can’t contain his feelings anymore: they saturate him, envelop him. And his emotions are visible to everyone who sees him, despite his best efforts, covering him like bright teal paint. (And it's a little sexual….) 

The sudden loss of Eliott   

> The sudden loss of Eliott, of the sight and sound of him, spikes Lucas with terror.

This was, to me, the pivotal moment—up until the paint blinds him and abruptly removes Eliott from his senses, Lucas thought he could go on without Eliott, create a new life for himself (tear up the water-logged floors and replace them)—then he sees Eliott at Tête d’Or and loses him in rapid succession, and he realizes that he can’t live without Eliott after all. Unfortunately, he has this realization a split second after he’s fucked up (irreparably, he thinks).

Mama Lallemant

Mama Lallemant is a bit cold in this series, no? I like to change little things in AUs—for instance some of Eliott’s lines from the series are delivered by Lucas, and vice versa—and I flipped the personalities of Lucas’ parents. I made Mama Lallemant somewhat distant, and I made Papa Lallemant, for all his faults, warmer and more jovial than both Mama Lallemant and Lucas expected.

**Chapter 5—**

Drunkenness 

I tried (did I succeed?) to show Lucas becoming less and less drunk as the night progressed. The sentences surrounding him go from long and loopy and warm (with stars spinning overhead) to short and cold (with an ache in his knees). 

Lucas sways closer, hands held out in front of him 

Polaris!

The blowjob  

> …the bathroom tile sticky under his shoes, the stall door flapping, the dandruff on the hair of the man kneeling before him, tawny hair slicked back. 

Tawny hair, tawny like Eliott’s, but slick, dotted with dandruff—not like Eliott after all. Poor Lucas started by trying to find a replacement and then moved on to Sara (someone entirely unlike Eliott but somewhat like Chloé) when he realized Eliott could not be replaced. 

The argument

I had such a hard time with this. I thought it was too disjointed and illogical. I rewrote it several times. Ultimately, I was trying to convey that while Eliott assumed Lucas was pulling away because he thought Eliott’s feelings for him were false, Lucas was actually pulling away because he knew Eliott’s feelings for him were very real, and he feared (correctly or incorrectly) that he was a trigger for Eliott’s mania. It may be that Lucas _is_ in fact a trigger, but he’ll come to realize that Eliott has coping mechanisms and a support system in place now.

Le jamais de mon toujours

At first, it may seem like Lucas is the one saying "jamais" to Eliott's "toujours," but it could go both ways. Eliott might be saying,  _I'll never forget about you, I'll never love another, something like Chamonix will never happen again, I'll make sure of it_ , and Lucas could be saying that he's worried it will  _always_ be like this—that he'll always end up derailing Eliott's progress.

**Chapter 6—**

Punching Charles

Look, it happened in this universe, and it was glorious.

The night of vigilant terror   

> …the night of vigilant terror, when Eliott had transformed, into an angel, into an eel, into a ghost, and it had taken everything from Lucas to keep hold of him, to keep him safe from the mountain.

A vague Tam Lin reference. This essay on “[The Body Horror of Tam Lin](https://tinydonkey.fairytalereview.com/2016/11/the-body-horror-of-tam-lin/)” is rather wonderful:   

> To rescue [Tam Lin] from the [Fairy] Queen and win him as a lover, the girl must hold him fast through countless transformations: a roaring lion, a terrifying snake, the painful scald of flame.
> 
> […] 
> 
> Which is to say: is it possible that there is something beautiful in love’s tenacity? Not in the sense that it’s good or admirable to endure pain, but in the sense that a transformation chase represents the monstrous qualities people display as they pass through tragedy — the qualities we might take on during the processing of grief or trauma. This link of change with pain, especially in the context of external pain (vis-à-vis the Fairy Queen), is in some ways a very honest look at any long-term relationship, where we must each see the other’s wounds and mold each other back into, if not our perfect form, then at least something passable. A transformation chase is not discomfort for the sake of another but the choice to remain by their side in a moment of shared discomfort — because, after all, it is only in fairy tales that change can happen with something as easy as a kiss. 

The Guides of Chamonix ([link](https://lensscaper.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/the-guides-of-chamonix-fresco/))

Guys, first of all, I fucked this up. In Chamonix, I wrote that Horace-Bénédict de Saussures and Jacques Balmat “were barely even contemporaries.” That’s a fucking lie! I discovered this randomly while reading an article in a climbing magazine. Not only were they contemporaries (with a manageable twenty-year age gap), but Balmat also _led Saussures up Mont Blanc!_ Whoops. I didn’t want to rewrite both Chamonix and Le Toi du Moi, so let us just leave it as it is; now you all know my mistake. 

Again, this is a mural by Patrick Commecy, who was also behind the  _[Fresque des Canuts](http://jeanpierrekosinski.over-blog.net/2015/11/le-mur-peint-des-canuts-a-lyon.html)_ in Lyon.

Secondly, this is one of Eliott’s many Grand Romantic Gestures™, outside “the titular Polaris.” He of course remembers the mural of the guides in Chamonix, as well as Lucas’ wistfulness as he looked at the statue of Balmat and Saussures. And he has his own longing to go back in time to Chamonix and make things right, as well as a desire to paint “[a]n image that stops people in their tracks, that people can’t stop looking at” (Chapter 2). Initially, I titled the work “Time Travel” (also a jokey reminder that the story is set ten years in the future, even though you can _barely tell_ ), then “If I Could Go Back in Time,” but I settled on “It’s About Time,” which you will probably remember was the text on the poster by the door of the foyer, the one we see when Eliott enters at the end of "Faudrait savoir mec."

The cliffhanger

Originally, Chapters 6 and 7 were one chapter, but they were one mega, 5,000 word behemoth, so I split them in half. I felt bad about ending with yet another instance of Lucas running for the hills, but as you see in Chapter 7, he only needed a moment to regroup.

 **Chapter 7—**  

His face, upturned    

> He thinks of the portrait, of his face, upturned, open, dazed, and longing.

You know the look. Lucas “if you don’t kiss me now I’ll die” Lallemant. Give Axel Auriant _all_ the Césars.

Mika    

> “Fucking hell, Lucas,” Mika says. He raises his brows. “I can see now why you cried so much. Bah, I'm about to shed a tear myself over that face being off the market.”

Mika is my favorite, and this is quite possibly my favorite (non-sappy) line in the entire sequel, after Yann's "Lucas, you got wasted and jerked this guy around so hard his neck is probably sore today" in Chapter 6.

The bicycle accident   

> Lucas is marked, too, with new moles on his chest, on his arms, and with the patch of pinkish skin down his left flank, discolored all the way to the calf. From a bicycle accident, he explains, gliding one palm across the other, mimicking the short skid over rough pavement. 

A hint that in some universes, things probably didn’t work out for them. (I was also going to have Lucas’ marks mirror Eliott’s tattoos—a scar on the knee, above the nipple, etc.—but I thought that was going too far. Soulmate overkill.)

The sex 

Again, many callbacks to the last sex scene in Chamonix.     

> Abruptly, he shoves Lucas back and yanks his legs up so they are braced against Eliott’s chest, his ankles against Eliott’s shoulders. The position is absurd, and Lucas feels exposed, vulnerable, his prick red and twitching against his belly. He runs his hands over the sheets, over his own chest, unsure where to place them.

vs.   

> “Fuck,” Eliott bites out, and he surges up and over, bearing Lucas down onto the bed, hooking Lucas’ legs over his shoulders. For a moment he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t move, just stares down at Lucas and gulps for breath. He’s hard against Lucas, and scalding hot, and Lucas wriggles against him, reaches for him.

And...   

> “—take you until you’re begging, until you can’t think, until you are wholly and completely mine—”

vs. 

> Lucas leans forward to kiss him. “Didn’t you say once,” he murmurs, “that you wanted to make me yours?”
> 
> […]
> 
> The room spins. Lucas cries out, ragged. _Eliott, more, Eliott, please, Eliott, yes._

It hurts to hold his gaze    

> Eliott’s eyes are shining. It hurts to hold his gaze, but Lucas forces himself to do it, a child daring himself to stare at the pale winter sun until his eyes smart with tears. 

vs.  

> It hurts to hold his gaze—the pain in Lucas’ chest is like a fist closing around his heart, _so tight, so tight_ —but Lucas forces himself to do it. He looks and looks until his own eyes fill with tears.

The entire scene was built around Lucas crying (sorry, I’m super into it) and telling Eliott that he loves him, over and over again. I can imagine how it might feel to Eliott to see the tears shining in Lucas’ eyes and to hear that—probably like a punch in the chest. Lucky boy.

Remember me

_Remember me, remember me, remember me under the sun._    

> Here, today, on the humid, summer-sapped bank of the Saône, under the cool eye of Lucille, the ice in Lucas’ chest splinters and begins to crack, and he lets himself remember other things.
> 
> The iridescent shimmer of frost in the air. Eliott’s hands, woolly in their black gloves, the fibers turning gold in the light. The glow of the afternoon in Eliott’s cheeks, the brightness of his smile. Eliott’s silhouette, stark against the brilliant snow, and his eyes, shining and crinkling with pleasure: eyes bluer than the sky.
> 
> He remembers them together under the sun.

And  _Show me some stars beneath this, beneath this ceiling._      

> These and other fragments of the infinite future spread out and hover before his eyes. The ceiling of his bedroom is hung with a hundred thousand glimmering stars.

Truth be told, the line about a hundred thousand glimmering stars was written before I’d even listened to “Remember” in full! I just really like stars and constellations. And roses. Speaking of, there’s another lovely line in “J’ai dans le coeur,” the credits song of the Petit Prince movie:

_Et dans le ciel immense des millions d'étoiles_ | And in the immense sky, millions of stars  
---|---  
_Embaument la nuit de constellations florales_ | Embellish the night with constellations of flowers  
_Car je sais que ta rose m’attend au ciel_ | Because I know that your rose is waiting for me in the sky  
  
(Okay, this is a rough translation. I don’t understand how “Embaument” becomes “embellish,” Google; I like how “constellations of flowers” sounds versus “floral constellations”; and I don’t believe in “Heaven,” so “le ciel” will forever be, for me, the sky!)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, that’s all, folks. I’m on to a new project that will probably also require a massive “story notes” post—the Renaissance AU! 
> 
> Thank you for sharing this story with me. See you again soon.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Le moi du toi (How did I get it right?)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18632296) by [FLWhite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FLWhite/pseuds/FLWhite)




End file.
